Novelist Quotes

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

Words are the birds that break cover and show your enemy where you're hiding.

Mike Carey (writer)

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.

People without curiosity are like houses without books: there's something unsettling about them.

Opportunity is rare, and a wise man will never let it go by him.

Dean flashed me a smile that promised rule-breaking and breathlessness.

Caitlin Kittredge

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.

A neglect of one's sentimental education early in life could bear the most unfortunate fruit.

Daniel Kehlmann

We accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying.

Life isn't perfect. It's not supposed to be. We all make mistakes. You bash your head against the wall and you get hurt, but you walk away and make the best of it. And that's what makes it life, Brenna, not perfection. You'll never find happiness if you only expect to find a perfect life. Happiness is something we reach for while we try to learn from our disappointments.

Sometimes people do things that are complicated. For complicated reasons.

Lauren Barnholdt

I have a million nightingales on the branches of my heart singing freedom.

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

Ysabeau S. Wilce

We are always the most violent against those whom we have injured.

Patrick O'Brian

Oh, love. Love is best of all. There is no such total element, not even pain. Who has ever loved, knows this. I need not say more.

Hatred can eat at you until there's nothing left, until you become the thing you hate.

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.

The wicked will run to the iron bridge, but it will collapse under their weight. The righteous will cross the paper bridge, and it will support them all. Paper is the only eternal bridge. Your purpose as a writer is to achieve one task, and one task only: to build a paper bridge to the world to come.

The fact that, in the United States, there are people serving ten-year prison terms for growing marijuana plants in their backyards while Wall Street racketeers, who have defrauded millions of people and destroyed the global economy, walk free is a kind of bizarre hypocrisy that boggles my mind.

Mark Haskell Smith

I have tried to be righteous all my life. Yet I have never been content.

Why would a man need both a wife and a mistress? A smart man would seek out and fall in love with a woman who can play both.

Hard, withering toil only can achieve a name; and long days and months and years must be passed in the chase of that bubble, reputation, which, when once grasped, breaks in your eager clutch into a hundred lesser bubbles, that soar above you still.

Donald Grant Mitchell

I'm so black they call me nighttime
When I walk along everyone looks for stars.

The idea of a series of items, following one another docilely, forms the only possible reasonable approach to life if you have to live it with a home and a husband and children, none of whom would dream of following one another docilely.

Shirley Jackson

He wanted to think of words that would make some difference but there were none in any language he knew that were sufficient to the moment or that would change a single thing.