Novelist Quotes

A tall young man sped swiftly up the wide stone steps leading to the doorway of a mansion in one of Chicago's most fashionable avenues.

George Barr McCutcheon

Not being able to live without someone is not love. It's need.

At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling.

Jeffrey Eugenides

We are as we are. How can you claim to know what life I was meant to lead, let alone threaten to force me into it? All your quibbling is nonsense. As well forbid your nose to snuff, or your ears to hear. We are as we do.

Let it simply be said that we know more about the details of the hours immediately before and the actual death of Jesus, in and near Jerusalem, than we know about the death of any other one man in all the ancient world.

You didn't realize what was passing you by until you slowed down a little bit to get a better look.

Karin Slaughter

When you don't know what to do, do what's right and do what's in front of you. But not necessarily what's right in front of you.

When we strike a balance between the challenge of an activity and our skill at performing it, when the rhythm of the work itself feels in sync with our pulse, when we know that what we're doing matters, we can get totally absorbed in our task. That is happiness.

The ability to achieve goals is directly related to a willingness to use the wastebasket.

Barbara Hemphill

You know the sultans used to light their garden parties with turtles? They'd put candles on their backs and let them wander around. Hundreds of them.

Within walking distance of any spot on Earth there's probably more than enough mystery to investigate in a lifetime.

Alix Kates Shulman

When you became a student at Oxford you realized both your own mortality, in the flow of this near-millennium of students, and also the small particle of immortality that attaches to you when you begin to belong to an immortal place.

No, every person on this planet has darkness inside them. Buried so deep that only you know it's there when your world is coming to an end. Oh, but it's there. It's always there.

Alexander Gordon Smith

Boredom has a tendency to bring out the worst in people's faces.

Being brave doesn't mean never being afraid, you know. It means going for it anyway because you know it's the right thing to do.

There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.

Most courage comes from being too tired and hungry to be afraid anymore.

Ysabeau S. Wilce

Other things awaited. It was good to be young and to know it for once. So much unfolding to do.

Only fools wait when their enemies are coming, to see if they may prove to be friends.

Philippa Gregory

Rather like spent swimmers, who had given up the hope of rescue and then had suddenly met with it, they were sensing with all their being, the feel of the solid ground beneath their feet, the grateful monotony of the skies above their heads,... and everywhere about them the immanence of God.... The Chinaberry Tree became a Temple.

Jessie Redmon Fauset

There has come a time when we can no longer remain silent but must speak up for our country which is being sold, abused, mined, depleted, drained, overworked, over-loved, its plants and animals becoming endangered and exterminated faster than we can renew them. Our country is silent, so we must speak and act to save it.

The most fundamental pride in the world is the pride you have in owning a little piece of land! You've got to live on your own land, walk on it, work in its dirt, to know the final pride of being free.

Janice Holt Giles

Visiting any shop for the first time is exciting. There's always that buzz as you push open the door; that hope; that belief - that this is going to be the shop of all shops, which will bring you everything you ever wanted, at magically low prices.

Sophie Kinsella

That's actually kind of scary. Sex with a mime. Do I have to pay extra to make sure you don't do the trapped-in-a-box thing while we're doing it?

Suzanne Brockmann

Cocoa-buttered girls were stretched out on the public beach in apparently random alignments, but maybe if a weather satellite zoomed in on one of those bodies and then zoomed back out, the photos would show the curving beach itself was another woman, a fractal image made up of the particulate sunbathers. All the beaches pressed together might form female landmasses, female continents, female planets and galaxies. No wonder men felt tense.

Bonnie Jo Campbell