Novelist Quotes

It takes bravery to care for someone — no matter who he is or what made him, whether he is weak or walking or jumping out of windows. The risk involved is enormous.

Deb Olin Unferth

The cast of Hamlet had not moved much. They had that haunted yet hopeful look in their eyes, like the ones you see in photographs of people crammed into steerage compartments, traveling to some new, unknown land.

Maureen Johnson

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

Perhaps the price of comfort is that life passes more rapidly. But for anyone who has lived in uneasiness, even for a short, memorable duration, it's a trade-off that will gladly be made.

Arthur Nersesian

So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.

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

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.

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

Writing that gets rewritten as the earth moves. If you look at the sky that way, it's this massive shifting poem, or maybe a letter, first written by one author, and then, when the earth moves, annotated by another. So I stare and stare until, one day, I can read it.

Maria Dahvana Headley

I took my mother's knife and played johnny johnny johnny on the playhouse floor. I was drunk, stabbed myself every few throws. I held my hand up and there was satisfaction at seeing my blood, the way there was when I saw the red gouges onmy face that people stared at and turned away. They were thinking I was beautiful, but they were wrong, now they could see how ugly and mutilated I was.

The sun is shining, mynah birds are chattering, palm trees are swaying, so what. I'm in the hospital and I'm healthy. My heart is beating as it should. My brain is firing off messages that are loud and clear. My wife is on the upright hospital bed, positioned the way people sleep on airplanes, her body stiff, head cocked to the side. Her hands on her lap.

Kaui Hart Hemmings

I wondered about the science of storms and how sometimes it seemed that a storm wanted to break the world and how the world refused to break.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

In all experience, there is something to be learned. In deepest sorrow, wisdom is found. In the well of despair, hope rises.

Juliet Marillier

Still, not much of a reason to live, is it? The fear of being punished for killing yourself.

Something I would always remember. When you forget how bad it hurts, you feel so free.

Love is patient. Love is kind. It bears all things. Love never fails. Love is as strong as death.

And they need not cause you grief. As my Highland grandmother said-and she had the Sight-Tis not the dead ye have to be concerned about! Beware of the Living! And she was a wise woman. The dead are beyond your help or mine, poor things. But the living need us. Thirty souls at the least, Phryne, are still on that island to praise God who might now be angels-or devils.

Kerry Greenwood

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.

He hated the war; it threatened much more than his lifestyle or peace of mind. It continually destroyed the world of the imagination, the only world where he felt happy.

Irène Némirovsky

Aunt Loretta has something that maybe you could call class. It's not the made-up kind that Grandma has, fake pearls and Sunday hats, but something that comes to you as if you were born to the king and queen. Aunt Loretta understands better than Grandma that reading a big book is more classy than wearing fake pearls watching TV.

Heidi W. Durrow

It is rather calming to remember that you really couldn't have foreseen what is happening to you.

Margaret Widdemer

Victory is freedom of mind and body.' I believe that is true. I would go further and say that victory is freedom of mind from body. Separation from the thing that imprisons us. Flight. Perhaps freedom from life itself. That is victory. Life is brutal. It is like this whip and these ropes. It hurts. It scars. But we must take it.

Everything in his life had come down to the sensation of her fingers against his. The person he was, the history he carried within himself, every joy and grief he had ever experienced, slipped way like an irrelevant garment. He was nothing but skin, speaking to another skin, and between the skins there was no need to find any words.

My job is to ensure the sanctity of this House. Ensuring the sanity of its Master seemed like a good start.

I think that sometimes the great changes in our lives, the ones that divide time, happen so deep down and silently that we don't even know when they occur......It frequently happens that the seasons of the greatest change are the times that feel the most tranquil, the most suspended, the most...timeless.

Anne Rivers Siddons