Novelist Quotes

I'm a strict materialist - but the police are brutal materialists.

Jack Williamson

Your hope is the most beautiful and the saddest in the world.

Off with the old and on with the new and never a second's thought between.

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.

The one thing I do remember is that as I retraced my steps through all the familiar streets of my life, Inow felt completely lost.

Carolyn Mackler

If she'd spaced her children out and had eleven babies in eleven years, she would have been no better than her own mother and sisters: irresponsible, a welfare cheat, another bit of Sawdust Lane white trash. But as luck would have it, she'd had them all at once, and now she was, overnight, middle-class. And respectable.

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

One of the tragic consequences of divorce is that the kids are legally obligated by the courts to spend a fixed amount of time with their dads. In normal families, dads and children happily ignore each other.

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

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.

For the first time, I had been struck by the excitement of the traveler who looks history in her subtle face.

Elizabeth Kostova

The pursuit of exotic beauty in such a life would have been like having a ball of tinfoil in your stomach, all that airy metal filling you up with hunger.

Laura Kasischke

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

Actors between plays are like ghosts looking for bodies to inhabit.

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.

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

Riding upon the back of a waterhorse - what mortal had ever stayed in such a seat for so long? On a horse made of cold currents and liquid convergences, jests and trickery - pressed against a hide like the burnished sea of midnight, thing look different to the rider.

Cecilia Dart-Thornton

Nothing can stop the questing of men, not even Man. If we will it, not only the wonders of space, but the very stars are ours.

Every generation proclaims that each must lead his own life, but seldom grants the subsequent generation the right to lead theirs.

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.

She said, 'God knows they owe me nought,
I tossed them to the foaming sea,
I tossed them to the howling wastes,
Yet still their love comes home to me.'

I never like anyone till I've seen him at his worst.

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

David Ebershoff

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

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.