Novelist Quotes

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

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.

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

It's wonderful to feel desired. There's a sense of power in it, really.

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

Civilization has imposed countless restrictions and conventions on each of us, with the result that the subconscious in the majority of us has become a storage room without a key. We are forced to suppress or forget so many events and ideas and thoughts that those to which we should have access are lost in the welter. However, there are people who seem capable of unlocking this part of their minds and extracting relevant information.

Margaret Millar

Our history is every human history; a black and gory business, with more scoundrels than wise men at the lead, and more louts than both put together to cheer and follow.

And still I persist in wondering whether folly must always be our nemesis.

You are a terror, aren't you? Leave this yard alone. I know just where everything is in it, and I won't be able to find the things I need for my transport spells if you tidy them up.'So there was probably a bundle of souls or a box of chewed hearts somewhere out here, Sophie thought. She felt really thwarted. 'Tidying up is what I'm here for!' she shouted at Howl. 'Then you must think of a new meaning for your life,' Howl said.

Diana Wynne Jones

Three things Marco taught me today race through my mind: boys will lie to your face just to have sex with you, don't trust any boy who says I love you, and never date a boy who lives on the south side of Fairfield.

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.

The more you rely on what you need, the more you become that which you rely on.

Catherine Asaro

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.

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

I mucked about with his hair. His shoes
were where he left them. His shoes are where he
left them.

Why do you think nothing concrete and lasting happened out of the 60s? Lots of people have been saying this lately, and I can't help feeling that the changes were so profound and total that no one remembers that there were changes! The 50s, my friends, happened in a different country than this one. We did not get everything we wanted, no. The world is not perfect now, and is that why some of us think we accomplished nothing? … Try to remember what life was like in the 50s. That's all I can say to that. It's the power structures that are trying to pretend that the change wasn't lasting, so they can convince people that protests and the like are futile now.
But they lie. I'm glad to see that many young people aren't buying it.

Doesn't matter what language you speak or what clothes you wear. Some things don't change. Families. Friends. Lovers. They're the same in every city in every country in every continent of the world.

Annabel Pitcher

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

Childhood was a terrible period for me. I was like a ship without anchor being swept along through darkness in a storm. Again and again I sought shelter, only to be forced out of it by something new.

I loved all the parts of him, even the ones I didn't understand.

"You got a ninety percent chance," he said. Osno said quickly, "How do you get that figure?" He always did that whenever somebody pulled a statistic on him. He hated statisticians.

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

The people who keep coping, keep trying, no matter how many blows Fate takes at them. Nobody'll make a song about them, but they're heroes all the same.

Mercedes Lackey

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?

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