Novelist Quotes

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

Philippa Gregory

The people who keep coping, keep trying, no matter how many blows Fate takes at them. Nobody'll make a song about them, but they're heroes all the same.

Mercedes Lackey

Mona's Law. That's what she calls it. She says you can have a hot job, a hot lover and a hot apartment, but you can't have all three at the same time.

Armistead Maupin

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.

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.

Crises of expression and spasms of eros:
that's the man of today,
the inside a vacuum,
the continuity of personality
provided by his suit,
which with stout cloth might be good for ten years.

If no one heard your sounds then you did not really make them.

Ye'll learn perhaps that in law, a friend prosecuting is better than a friend defending!

Elinor Macartney Lane

If you deny mystery-even in the guise of death-then you deny life, and you will walk like a ghost through your days, never knowing the secrets of the extremes. The deep sorrows, the absolute joys.

The most underrated of all contemporary American writers of fiction.

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

By every mortal standard, the worst faeries in the world were those in the Dark Court. They fed on the baser emotions; they engaged in activities that the other-also amoral-faery courts repudiated. They were also the only ones she truly trusted or understood.

One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fiber of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardily.

There's a lot more satisfaction in thinking about money than in spending it, if people only knew.

Josephine Pinckney

I don't have any of the answers, son. Never did. All I can do is keep asking the questions. Keep trying to make sense of why people do what they do.

Rodman Philbrick

We are not here in this world to drift like seaweed. Whatever intelligence we have, it is our duty to drive to the utmost.

Blanche Willis Howard

In life, periods of solitude were blessings. Dying alone was a bitter curse.

Although we strap time to our wrists, stuff it into our pockets, hang it on our walls, a perpetually moving picture for every room of the house, it can still run away, elude and evade, and show itself again only when there are minutes remaining and there is nothing left to do except wait till there are none.

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.

They say that lightning never strikes in the same place twice, but the same is not true for courage. As it turns out, when courage strikes, it almost always begets more courage.

Growing up is like taking down the sides of your house and letting strangers walk in.

The sudden and abrupt removal of my all-consuming goal... well, it was like I was a donut, and somebody had sucked all the jelly out of me. But I could stuff new jelly in there. It would just get my hands a little sticky in the process.

Brandon Sanderson

I've given up reading the papers. Since the world's so obviously bent on killing itself, I decided months ago to sit back and let it.

You'll remember someone who broke your heart, and you'll think to yourself, 'Oh yes, I remember how that feels.' But you can't.

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