Novelist Quotes

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

There is no power in nature which from nothing could have made the universe, and none which could reduce the universe to nothing:

When Mama starts to move across a room, people pay attention. You can never be sure she's not going to grab you by the top of the head to steady herself. And she's pretty free with that walking stick, too.

Despite everything that Harlem did to our generation, I think it gave something to a few. It gave them a strength that couldn't be obtained anywhere else.

Isn't it interesting what a stranger can offer? A little wisdom, a little mercy, a little love.

David Ebershoff

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

There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.

For true happiness, sane enjoyment, you must look to the country, not town. Only you want one true heart beside you with which to enjoy it!

Ellen Buckingham Mathews

"You know, Mouse," [Tabby] said, "a brilliant cat like me should have smart friends; people who can count to more than four." "I can count to more than four," answered Mouse, very offended. "And I can do hard sums, and I know geography and history, and I can knit and..."

Still, even without the country or a lake, the summer was a fine thing, particularly when you were at the beginning of it, looking ahead into it. There would be months of beautifully long, empty days, and each other to play with, and the books from the library.

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

Elinor Macartney Lane

All my life, I knew, all my life I would be haunted by words from Shakespeare.

Sarah Smith (writer)

We only have one life to live, and must go on with it to the end, that if we feel it is meaningless, then we ourselves must give it meaning.

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.

Sunday, that day so tedious to the triflers of earth, so full of beautiful reposes of calmness and strength for the earnest and heavenly minded.

Maria Jane McIntosh

The way we lay
we mimed a body
of water. It was
this or that way
with
the dead and we
were them.

Nathaniel Mackey

Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love?

Being brave doesn't mean never being afraid, you know. It means going for it anyway because you know it's the right thing to do.

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

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

Philippa Gregory

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.

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

Josephine Pinckney

We are the kind of short-
term visitors who
each engage the heart
of each
others lives, one
anothers bodies;
sometimes forever yet
so brief the
sad distance
of
our all-night transit
leaves us
numb: to love.

A gaggle of old ladies is glued to the window at the end of the hall like children or jailbirds. They're spidery and frail, their hair as fine as mist. Most of them are a good decade younger than me, and this astounds me. Even as your body betrays you, your mind denies it.--There are five of them now, white headed old things huddled together and pointing crooked fingers at the glass.

I have always noticed that people only think you are stupid if you do things differently from them.