Novelist Quotes

I would add to my mother's wisdom that the key to love is in the breath. You know you love a man when you can stand his breath in the morning after a night of drinking and cigarettes. When you can kiss him after he finishes a garlic and butter sandwich and still enjoy the feel of his lips. When he looks into your eyes, tells you he loves you—and the pickled herring and onions are stronger than his voice—yet you still smile. You still want to be close to him. Yes, then you have found love. My Baba used to say that the breath is a taste of the spirit. When two spirits recognize each other in memory and future, then love grows.

Valya Dudycz Lupescu

They sat and combed their beautiful hair,
Their long, bright tresses, one by one,
As they laughed and talked in the chamber there,
After the revel was done.

Glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but a liquid?an old sheet of glass will not only take on a royal and purplish tinge but will reveal its true liquid nature by having grown fatter at the bottom and thinner at thetop, and? It isinvisible, solid, in short a joyous and paradoxical thing, asgood a material as any tobuild a life from.

I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me--a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it rather than supports it, and the fact that this isn't dignified doesn't worry me.

Evil is short lived. Never judge of the whole round of life by the mere segment you can see. The whole is, in the end, perfect.

Be happy. Decide to be happy. If you want to be happy, be happy! No one cares if you're happy or not, so why wait for permission? And did it really matter if you had been deeply unhappy in your past? Who but you remembered that?

The country was a dreamland; and perhaps it even reminded my wife's grandfather of the night he woke up drunk in his friend's house, beside his friend's wife, everything similar but new, different, better. The United States of America was like an eternity of those first disorientating seconds of not knowing and not wanting to.

And in the end, I think, we're all just trying to survive, aren't we?

Janice Y. K. Lee

A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response.

Your past is your shadow. It has form but no substance, except in the places you allow it to touch you. (

The whole of society in Washington is to some degree political. It is like no other capital city known to me, in that political thinking, the whole business, technical and personal, of politics, is not diluted by an equal interest in art, industry, amusement, anything you like. I don't meant that these are non-existent in Washington -- only that they are subdued to the ruling passion.

Music comes from an icicle as it melts, to live again as spring water.

Henry Williamson

Men want a challenge, but they want a challenge they can win.

Whitney Gaskell

If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.

I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift.

A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bittersweet mixture for all possible household emergencies and its action varies accordingly as it is taken in a wineglass or a tablespoon, inhaled, gargled or rubbed on the chest by hard fingers covered with rings.

I guess this is how love is when it comes undone. No matter how tight you knit the stitches, a sharp tug on a loose thread will transform your warm sweater into a mangled heap of yarn that you can't reuse or repair.

The view from the window, particularly if you enjoy neon, is extraordinary.

Chris Bachelder

If you want to know how old a woman is... ask her sister-in-law.

Art is the most terrifying of human inventions — it preserves the right to undermine all categories.

Love is so powerful, it's like unseen flowers under your feet as you walk.

It is very painful to love someone and believe you cannot be with them.

Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

Flannery O'Connor

We are a nation of children letting horrible things happen, and flunking Calc.