Novelist Quotes

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

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

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

It is a truism throughout the civilized galaxy that when you go to the police, your troubles really begin.

Robert Sheckley

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

I channel the rote and the new and unseen. My head has always been the busiest of crossroads, a festival of happy and unhappy arrivals. In the hours before daybreak when I was a boy, god sent me words as visitors.

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

Karin Slaughter

But it is never over;
nothing ends until we want it to.
Look, in shattered midnights,
On black ice under silver trees,
We are still dancing, dancing.

Gwendolyn MacEwen

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

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.

The implications of self-definition, self-celebration, and perhaps not a little self-inflation and self-designation are nevertheless quite as obvious in each as for all.

Albert Murray (writer)

My writing about Cuba [is] more like an act of creation. Whatever my Cuba is about, it's my own version. I'm not a cultural anthropologist.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I got nothing. Even the spies I'm spying on who are spying on other spies got nothing.

H.P. Lovecraft is for the summer between junior and senior years in high school. Cosmic fear hits you about then anyway — you realize you'll soon have to Get a Real Job or Go To College or Both and in those days, Be Drafted. A dose of Cthulhu helps put these feelings in perspective.

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.

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

Kate and Mercer gave each other a smile with a future in it.

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

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