Diary Novels Quotes

We are women. We talk. We all do. I love to talk. It's my reason for being. No. It's my raison d'etre. Now that is fucking classy. Not everyone has one. A classy one. Anyway. ~ Suzy Valtsioti

Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find. ~ Jonathan Franzen

He could lose himself in the copper warmth of her eyes. Except, no, this wasn't losing himself. This was finding something precious. ~ Melissa Tagg

I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man. ~ Anne Bronte

The trouble was that I failed to record so much , I wrote, but how could I have believed that if I tried hard enough, I could remember everything? ❖ ~ Sarah Manguso

I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean ... I had miles of Bible in memory: some perforce, but most by hap, like the words to songs. There was no corner of my brain where you couldn't find, among the files of clothing labels and heaps of rocks, among the swarms of protozoans and shelves of novels, whole tapes and snarls and reels of Bible. ~ Annie Dillard

You have been abroad then?" said Henry, a little surprised.

"Oh! No, I only mean what I have read about. It always puts me in mind of the country that Emily and her father traveled through, in The Mysteries of Udolpho. But you never read novels, I dare say?"

"Why not?"

"Because they are not clever enough for you - gentlemen read better books."

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days - my hair standing on end the whole time."

"Yes," added Miss Tilney, "and I remember that you undertook to read it aloud to me, and that when I was called away for only five minutes to answer a note, instead of waiting for me, you took the volume into the Hermitage Walk, and I was obliged to stay till you had finished it. ~ Jane Austen

[on going to Sunday school:] It looks like rain, and I hope it will rain cats and dogs and hammers and pitchforks and silver sugar spoons and hay ricks and paper-covered novels and picture frames and rag carpets and toothpicks and skating rinks and birds of paradise and roof gardens and burdocks and French grammars before Sunday school time. ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

I used the pen name because I knew I wanted to write better novels under my own name someday. ~ Nelson DeMille

The real question is: How do you react? What do you do next? Evade responsibilities? Bury yourself in work? What do you do? All three of my novels take up that question, although none gives an answer. ~ David Guterson

Librarians are amazing like that. They will hand you a book they know will make your eyes bug out because they know that is the point of novels, not to satisfy but to surprise. ~ Max Barry

The essentials," I answered, "are to learn to shape God with forethought, care, and work; to educate and benefit their community, their families, and themselves; and to contribute to the fulfillment of the Destiny. ~ Octavia E. Butler

I don't know. I love the idea of democracy, the hope, yes, I love that. I couldn't live without that. But the country? You mean the thing on the map, lines, everything inside the lines is good and nothing outside them matters? How can an adult love such a childish idea? ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Loneliness is the diary keeper's lover. It is not narcissism that takes them to their desk every day. And who "keeps" whom, after all? The diary is demanding; it imposes its routine; it must be chored the way one must milk a cow; and it alters your attitude toward life, which is lived, finally, only in order that it may makes it way to the private page.
[From "Fifty Literary Pillars", p.35] ~ William H Gass

Who was I to meddle in people's love lives? Mine was a mess. My heart
wanted the one thing it wasn't allowed to have - love with someone besides my
cupid-appointed soul mate. I was so screwed up, I made the dysfunctional
relationships on Jerry Springer look wholesome. ~ Jenn Windrow

Manet, however, was enthralled; he proceeded to give the title Nana to his painting of the courtesan Henriette Hauser, naming it after the daughter of the alcoholic laundress Gervaise Lantier in L'assommoir. Zola had not yet even begun to write his novel Nana, but the references in Manet's painting were clear. When the Salon (presumably scandalized) rejected it, he brashly showed it in the window of a shop on the Boulevard des Capucines, virtually on the doorstep of the Opéra Garnier, where it created a succès de scandale. Zola, of course, appreciated the value of scandal in promoting his novels and was adept at creating it. ~ Mary McAuliffe

And the moment she held that diary in her hands, she summoned all her demons at once. The moment she opened it a hand from every page held her and pulled her inside. And in a moment even before she could realize what was happening to her she was drowning in the sea, fighting to breathe and fighting to swim back to the surface. But the hands kept pulling her down deep into the darkness until her voice died slowly. ~ Akshay Vasu

Dystopian novels help people process their fears about what the future might look like; further, they usually show that there is always hope, even in the bleakest future. ~ Lauren Oliver

I'd read one too many crime novels where the victim was just a name: body number one, dead woman number 12. I understood fear, and I wanted to create characters who made readers say, 'Please, don't hurt this guy.' That's the key to suspense. It's easy to disgust a reader. It's much harder to make them care. ~ Mark Billingham

You carry the weight of the preternatural world on those big shoulders of yours. But your heart is even bigger, and the burden you harbor there heavier. ~ N.D. Jones

These are the experiences I wish to record in this book, which should really be called The Diary of a Palaeontologist. But in committing them to paper I found it advisable to alter and add a good deal, to enable the reader without specialized training to follow me along the winding paths of palaeontology and prehistory. ~ Gustav Heinrich Ralph Von Koenigswald

She read novels. One book after another, sometimes at the rate of one a day, for a solid year. An acceptable form of escape that didn't leave a hangover. ~ Wendy Wax

I hope that when the characters in my novels dream beyond their current circumstance, it inspires the reader to do the same. ~ Kristine Scarrow

If you're a novelist, you have sort of themes that run throughout novels. You start a novel and you finish a novel. With record-making in the singer-songwriter world or whatever it is that I do, it's a little different because there is no specific arc that is necessarily, like it's not a concept record. ~ Amos Lee

Novels shouldn't aspire to answer questions, and I wouldn't presume to offer advice about love or marriage in any case. What's fascinating to me about marriage as a subject for fiction - a subject that fiction has taken on with gusto since the 19th century - is how unknowable other people's relationships are. Even the marriages of your parents, your siblings, your closest friends always remain something of a mystery. Only in fiction can you pretend to know people completely. ~ Nell Freudenberger

Having something worth telling and a passion to tell it are what make you a good writer. I can't tell you how many times I've read novels or articles that used complicated words and witty wordplay to cover up the fact that they had absolutely no story to tell. A good story should be enjoyed; sometimes simplicity can go a long way. ~ Chris Colfer

He hadn't been able to help himself, couldn't have stopped himself from kissing her even if he'd tried. Fighting with her was a million times better than dreaming, and the fight had conjured his soul to act, to kiss her. And that kiss was nothing like anything he had ever experienced before.
He knew if he would die then, he'd die a happy man because it meant he'd savor her forever, relish her passion among his. She'd tasted so sweet, like the sweetest fruit or the sweetest dessert. Her lips were heaven on his, his heaven on Earth. ~ J.L. Sheppard

I don't know who he was," Kavita flat-out states, "but whoever he was he sure did a number on you, didn't he?"
Mary leans forward to ensure he would see her deviant stare. "Did it ever occur to you that maybe I did a number on him?"
Kavita leans in closer as well, and with that same deviant expression, "Yes. I have. ~ Carroll Bryant

I always read a lot as a kid and I'd spend long periods of time in my room reading ... I wasn't reading anything great until I got older, but I used to read Agatha Christie mysteries and all of Ian Fleming's 'James Bond' novels. ~ Michael Riedel

Literature - novels, plays, and poems - can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school. ~ Jane Smiley

For whom, it suddenly occured to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. ~ George Orwell

In the act of creation there is always, it seems, an awful selfishness. So Dickens's wife and mistress had to suffer so that dickens could make his novels and his fortune. At least a bank manager's money is not so tainted by egotism. Mine was not a destructive profession. A bank manager doesn't leave a trail of the martyred behind him. ~ Graham Greene

Thomas Mann used to write education novels and now you can write an education memoir, and there are all these memoirs coming out now about people's relationships with books. Like anything else, these can be good or bad. The genre doesn't make it good or bad, it's the execution. ~ Marco Roth

I'm writing a movie about Mozart going to New York in the '60s. I've been reading so many novels. ~ John Cale

Every man is a diary in which he writes one story while intending to write another. His humblest moment is when he compares the two ~ Hugh B. Brown

My books are based on emotions, feelings, relationships. In these areas women are experts, so it's not strange that the main characters of my novels are females. ~ Isabel Allende

Her giggles were light in my darkness. ~ Shana Vanterpool

When Pat gave her 'criminal-hero' Tom Ripley a charmed and parentless life, a wealthy, socially poised Alter Ego (Dickie Greenleaf), and a guilt-free modus operandi (after he kills Dickie, Tom murders only when necessary), she was doing just what her fellow comic book artists were doing with their Superheroes: allowing her fictional character to finesse situations she herself could only approach in wish fulfillment. And when she reimagined her own psychological split in Ripley's character - endowing him with both her weakest traits (paralyzing self-consciousness and hero-worship) and her wildest dreams (murder and money) - she was turning the material of the 'comic book' upside down and making it into something very like a 'tragic book.' 'It is always so easy for me to see the world upside down,' Pat wrote in her diary– and everywhere else. ~ Joan Schenkar

Sometimes, I feel like I connect more deeply with the characters in novels than with people I meet in real life. Maybe because in novels you get to read their thoughts. In life, you never know what people are thinking. ~ Varian Krylov

Some memories just stay. They just refuse to give up on staying. Maybe it is good that they stay. It helps us stay rooted. It helps us to know who we really are. ~ Aditi Bose

I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels. ~ Umberto Eco

ANDERSONVILLE DIARY JOHN H. RANSOM, LATE FIRST SERGEANT NINTH MICH. CAV., AUTHOR AND PUBLISHER, 1881 ~ John L. Ransom

I got my love of animals from the Dr. Doolittle books and my love of Africa from the Tarzan novels. I remember my mum taking me to the first Tarzan film, which starred Johnny Weissmuller, and bursting into tears. It wasn't what I had imagined at all. ~ Jane Goodall

You've become a fire within me." He pressed her palm to the center of his chest. "Right here. Bringing light to places I never knew were in shadow." His breath shuddered out of him. "I can't go back to the darkness, Fiona." Suza Kates, Chosen Blood ~ Suza Kates

The novels which I approve are such as display human nature with grandeur ~ Jane Austen

I certainly think we're going to see more and more graphic novels and more illustrated novels. ~ Charlaine Harris

Bloody global warming. Funny breed us Brits. We moan when it rains cats and dogs and complain when it's too hot. Let the protestors emigrate to bleeding Siberia. That's what I say, eh? ~ Anthony Hulse

Most novels I come across have all the excitement of a long trip on a bus with a sensitive glee club. Yammer and chat. ~ Barry Hannah

When you have a grasp on eternity your eyes won't ever see the battle or the lost people that hurt you. You will see a beautiful story of hope, in every character. It is not one person god loves. He loves us all and this is his story, our story and theirs. ~ Shannon L. Alder