Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest Quotes

Gerald began - but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash - to pee. ~ Jim Gleeson

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss
a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil. ~ Molly Ringle

A fiction which is designed to inculcate an object wholly alien to the imagination sins against the first law of art; and if a writer of fiction narrow his scope to particulars so positive as polemical controversy in matters ecclesiastical, political or moral, his work may or may not be an able treatise, but it must be a very poor novel. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

The real truthfulness of all works of imagination, sculpture, painting, and written fiction, is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

As it has been finely expressed, "Principle is a passion for truth." And as an earlier and homelier writer hath it, "The truths we believe in are the pillars of our world. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

In the hour of strait and need, we measure men's stature not by the body, but the soul! ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

That's best Which God sends. 'Twas His will: it is mine. ~ Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl Of Lytton

True, This! -
Beneath the rule of men entirely great
The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold
The arch-enchanters wand! - itself is nothing! -
But taking sorcery from the master-hand
To paralyse the Caesars, and to strike
The loud earth breathless! - Take away the sword -
States can be saved without it! ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The same refinement which brings us new pleasures exposes us to new pains. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Philosophy, while it soothes the reason, damps the ambition. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

The man who has acquired the habit of study, though for only one hour every day in the year, and keeps to the one thing studied till it is mastered, will be startled to see the way he has made at the end of a twelvemonth. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Love sacrifices all things to bless the thing it loves. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

When some one sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a monomania,
when you think, because Heaven has denied you this or that, on which you had set your heart, that all your life must be a blank,
oh, then diet yourself well on biography,
the biography of good and great men. See how little a space one sorrow really makes in life. See scarce a page, perhaps, given to some grief similar to your own, and how triumphantly the life sails on beyond it. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Earnest men never think in vain, though their thoughts may be errors. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Love creates, love cements, love enters and harmonizes all things. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

The heart of a man's like that delicate weed, / Which requires to be trampled on, boldly indeed / Ere it gives forth the fragrance you wish to extract. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

The easiest person to deceive is one's self. ~ Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Bright and illustrious illusions! ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Men never forgive those in whom there is nothing to pardon. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

We tell our triumphs to the crowds, but our own hearts are the sole confidants of our sorrows. ~ Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

By degrees, the bitterness at my heart diffused itself to the circumference of the circle in which my life went its cheerless mechanical round. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Expression is the mystery of beauty. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

We lose the peace of years when we hunt after the rapture of moments. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Self-confidence is not hope; it is the self-judgment of your own internal forces in their relation to the world without, which results from the failure of many hopes and the non-realization of many fears. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

All doubt is cowardice - all trust is brave. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Refuse to be ill. Never tell people you are ill; never own it to yourself. Illness is one of those things which a man should resist on principle at the onset. ~ Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

And Viola is the idol, the theme of Naples. She is the spoiled sultana of the boards. To spoil her acting may be easy enough, - shall they spoil her nature? No, I think not. There, at home, she is still good and simple; and there, under the awning by the doorway, - there she still sits, divinely musing. How often, crook-trunked tree, she looks to thy green boughs; how often, like thee, in her dreams, and fancies, does she struggle for the light, - not the light of the stage-lamps. Pooh, child! be contented with the lamps, even with the rush-lights. A farthing candle is more convenient for household purposes than the stars. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

We may observe in humorous authors that the faults they chiefly ridicule have often a likeness in themselves. Cervantes had much of the knight-errant in him; Sir George Etherege was unconsciously the Fopling Flutter of his own satire; Goldsmith was the same hero to chambermaids, and coward to ladies that he has immortalized in his charming comedy; and the antiquarian frivolities of Jonathan Oldbuck had their resemblance in Jonathan Oldbuck's creator. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Centuries roll, customs change, but, ever since the time of the earliest mother, woman yearns to be the soother. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Ask any school-boy up to the age of fifteen where he would spend his holidays. Not one in five hundred will say, "In the streets of London," if you give him the option of green fields and running waters. It is, then, a fair presumption that there must be something of the child still in the character of the men or the women whom the country charms in maturer as in dawning life. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

They only fall, that strive to move, Or lose, that care to keep. ~ Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl Of Lytton

If you wish to be loved, show more of your faults than your virtues ~ Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton