Histrorical Fiction Quotes

Abe picked up a shiny silver star, now a bit tarnished, the symbol of a happier time. The year after their daughter's death came the joy of a a newborn son,. Jeremy just squeaked into life the day before the holiday. The star was Abe's gift to his wife that Christmas. He smiled as he hung it on a branch. ~ Debra Holland

Hello fake Everett children. ~ Monet Polny

I've said in many interviews that I like my fiction to be unpredictable. I like there to be considerable suspense. ~ George R R Martin

We've seen firsthand the footprints of the Mordant's treachery. ~ Karen Azinger

The tall monk who came striding down the shadowed monastery corridor was surprisingly young, barely thirty. As he swept past the novices, his dark robe flapping wildly around his legs, they bobbed their heads in fearful deference. ~ Michelle Frost

Everything is About To Change. ~ Chris Mentillo

Never tell a computer to forget it. ~ Larry Niven

Realism is knowing fantasy and reality intersect constantly. Realism is living with the awareness that every act changes the world. ~ Ales Kot

When feeling came back, in a storm of color and force and sensation, the most you could do was hold on to the person beside you and hope you could weather it. Alex closed her eyes and expected the worst-but it wasn't a bad thing; it was just a different thing. A messier one, more complicated one. She hesitated, and then she kissed Patrick back, willing to concede that you might have to lose control before you could find what you'd been missing. ~ Jodi Picoult

The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness. ~ Anais Nin

If God gives you a hundred bucks, you better bet He's going to ask you what you bought. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Possil - and other areas like it, in other cities - has been in that state for so long that it now gives birth to itself. No chance of revolution now - the anger is muted and turned inwards. Possil picks at its own sores. When somebody manages to get a new car, somebody else is bound to torch it. But it doesn't occur to them to head out to Bearsden or Newton Meams, the places where the nobs live, and torch a few Mercs or Rolls Royces. They don't do it to the people whose opinion matters. They only do it to each other. And who in Newton Mearns cares if a bunch of schemies on the other side of town burn their own property? And so Possil, and Maryhill, and Easterhouse, and Drumchapel all stay the same. ~ Barry Graham

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written. ~ Robert Hass

Sometimes journalists ask me, "What's the message?" There is no message. I think that fiction should not be trying to give messages. Just tell a story. ~ Isabel Allende

You know how sometimes you tell yourself that you have a choice, but really you don't have a choice? Just because there are alternatives doesn't mean they apply to you. ~ Rick Yancey

The sad thing is that, for many writers of fantasy fiction, the inclusion of magic seems to mean that logical ramifications and real-world laws both go out the window. ~ Jane Lindskold

You know this has really affected my ability to trust myself. No matter what happened in my life, I was always able to trust myself. My instincts. Two men in a row carrying on indiscretions makes me feel like I made up some story. Almost like a fiction, I
wrote in my mind that had a beginning, middle and end. It feels like I manufactured some ideal life that was a made-up invention that I needed to believe was the truth. ~ Jacqueline Simon Gunn

Fiction is the history of the obscure. ~ Jill Lepore

The two endorsements I'm most proud of come from Isabel Wilkerson and Toni Morrison. The latter is the greatest American fiction writer of our time, and the former is on her way to being the greatest American nonfiction writer of our time. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable. ~ Theodore J. Kaczynski

Reading takes the reader to faraway lands, new cultures, new and exciting adventures; you meet new friends and enemies; it takes the reader from the heights of the imagination to the depths of human emotions; all without taking a single step. ~ Carlos Salinas

And then swooping back in again, even faster, one long incredible fall through the human-shape of me and this time down past where I don't know how to go any smaller and I find myself somehow looping around to out-past-too-big again; so that everything seems to fit inside the smallest place in me and vice versa. And then for a while I'm not sure if I am inside the universe or the universe is inside me. The only thing that seems for sure is that somewhere in all the dancing around of whatever it is that dances, there's a human-shape of me, with either everything inside of it or it is inside of everything, or somehow - don't ask me how - both at the same time. ~ Lisa Bunker

Today's breakfast consist of rice and a piece of bread fried in a bit of salt pork grease. At least I have my memories of grand banquets and fine foods, but this is all the children have ever known. I suppose it is best not to have anything to compare. ~ Nancy B. Brewer

He had gone again and, emboldened by his first successful trip, had chosen a different sort of world to enter, that of THE MONK. He had studied the book with great care and finally selected a passage that was purely descriptive.

The result was the same. The instant he closed the top of the showcase, he was transported to the world described in the open pages. He found himself standing - and shivering - in a dank corridor that, he knew, was far underground. Feeble candlelight flickered in the distance, off to his left. Water dripped down the gleaming walls and startled rats scurried past his feet. The air was stale and unpleasant. Down the corridor to his left, he could hear singing but could not make out the words. Then suddenly, from his right, he heard a woman's high-pitched scream, its sound caroming off the wet, stone walls of the passageway. He jumped, his skin crawling at the back of his neck.

And found himself back in his warm and familiar room.

("I Shall Not Leave England Now") ~ Alan Ryan

The kernel of truth sank into the fertile soil of [her] imagination, possibilities for a happy resolution suggesting themselves in vague flashes of potential and promise... ~ Ana Chapman

What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

The Coilhunter wasn't much of a talker. He liked to keep things short and sweet, just like the lives of criminals. Well, the short bit anyway. ~ Dean F. Wilson

You can do it! You can find the strength to carry this load. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

The viewpoint character in each story is usually someone trapped in a living nightmare, but this doesn't guarantee that we and the protagonist are at one. In fact Woolrich often makes us pull away from the person at the center of the storm, splitting our reaction in two, stripping his protagonist of moral authority, denying us the luxury of unequivocal identification, drawing characters so psychologically warped and sometimes so despicable that a part of us wants to see them suffer. Woolrich also denies us the luxury of total disidentification with all sorts of sociopaths, especially those who wear badges. His Noir Cop tales are crammed with acts of police sadism, casually committed or at least endorsed by the detective protagonist. These monstrosities are explicitly condemned almost never and the moral outrage we feel has no internal support in the stories except the objective horror of what is shown, so that one might almost believe that a part of Woolrich wants us to enjoy the spectacles. If so, it's yet another instance of how his most powerful novels and stories are divided against themselves so as to evoke in us a divided response that mirrors his own self-division.

("Introduction") ~ Francis M. Nevins Jr.

When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months. ~ Vernor Vinge

The truth is far, far stranger. ~ M. Suddain

Next time
we will roll out the red carpet for you in the United States of Arabia, my brethren! ~ Leonard Leventon

He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of fiction. One treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin; the other treated of man as a clod, ignoring his heavensent dreams and divine possibilities. ~ Jack London

In the crime fiction section, you may just find a novel that talks about the place where you're from and speaks to you about your life - or the life yours could have become if a little misfortune had come your way. ~ Adrian McKinty

It's surprising how much life can change in a minute, how we can be swept up in a moment by kind words or affection craved for a lifetime. We'll do anything to feel alive, to feel human. ~ Brittany Weekley

Man, that's a killer strategy, that is, an awesome way to persuade the incognoscenti that we're not crazed hokum junkies, high on hackwork, trying to pimp our addled euphoria to anyone who passes. Yeah, vehement denial that we've got anything to do with the crack-whore pump-daddy beast of a thousand cocks locked in the closet. Bitter accusations of snootcocking snipewankery when they point out that crack-whore pimp-daddy beast of a thousand cocks in the closet. Offended outrage when they assume the mindfuck we're touting is a cheap handjob, just because we're, like, standing on a street corner dressed to sell our arses. And because our first words to a prospective customer just happens to be, 'Hey, big boy. ~ Hal Duncan

People can always say I don't look impressive enough, but they can't argue over how strong I am once I punch them in the face. ~ F.C. Yee

How many men can say, as I must, 'I am a man whose only friend is the King of England'? I have everything, you would think. And yet take Henry away, and I have nothing. ~ Hilary Mantel

We can't change the world by shouting, but our words can have meaning if we give them enough respect. ~ Evan Meekins

I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction. ~ China Mieville

Evening had turned the sky a deep persimmon. The remaining sunlight enriched the colors of the ubiquitous flowers and foliage to even greater vibrancy, as if the saturation filter had been notched up several levels.

Caleb noted all this in passing as he strode deliberately forward. He didn't know how he was going to do this, only that he had to make the attempt. ~ G.S. Jennsen