Literature Novel Quotes

Death is the Inevitable Price We Must Pay. ~ Ellen J. Barrier

You say fate is almost indispensable to literature - I think it's completely indispensable, at least in a novel, because a novel always has a plot. Even if nothing happens, even if someone just spends a day walking around Dublin, or whatever, there's still something going on. ~ Daniel Kehlmann

The novel is inherently a political instrument, regardless of its subject. It invites you - more than invites you, induces you - to live inside another person's skin. It creates empathy. And that's the antidote to bigotry. The novel doesn't just tell you about another life, which is what a newspaper would do. It makes you live another life, inhabit another perspective. And that's very important. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

As a writer I have persisted in my uncertainty, alternating between novels which could charitably be considered literature and world reporting which by another stretch of objective standards might be called history. ~ James A. Michener

Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I've no regrets. ~ Roman Payne

Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel. ~ Carl Clinton Van Doren

Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people. ~ Virginia Woolf

In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them all. ~ D.H. Lawrence

That's sounds right. Another $5,000 went to dress up the Little League park where he had played so many games. Seems like he paid off the MORTAGE on his parents' home, which wasn't that much. ~ John Grisham

People use each other as markers for what's real, so you can't be alone anymore. Solitude draws suspicions.

pg. 163 ~ S.K. Kalsi

Fitzgerald has charm. It's a silly word, but it's an exact word for me. I like 'The Great Gatsby' and it's sad, gay nostalgia. ~ Truman Capote

Presently a soprano voice of richness and depth floated from the open windows of the parlor, resonating over the darkening greenery. All at once it was as if the entire scene before them was awakened by that voice, infused with unexpected life: the western sky, streaked with bands of pale gold and purple; the two houses, standing gray and disconsolate against that sky; the clusters of trees casting deep black shadows here and there across the ground. The same voice that brought everything suddenly to life also drew them into another, much deeper world - a world that was normally hidden, a world that stretched out into eternity. Yusuke, who had at first looked on with a sense of distance as everyone else sat listening, their faces intent on the music, found himself being gradually drawn in as well, forgetting the moment and the place, lending his ear during that unworldly stretch of time as if entranced. No one spoke. The singing could not have lasted ten minutes, but when it ended he found the darkness all at once grew deeper. ~ Minae Mizumura

But Carol had not betrayed her. Carol loved her more than she loved her child. That was part of the reason why she had not promised.
She was gambling now as she had gambled on getting everything from the detective that day on the road, and she lost then, too. And now she saw Carol's face changing, saw the little signs of astonishment and shock so subtle that perhaps only she in the world could have noticed them, and Therese could not think for a moment. ~ Patricia Highsmith

Everyone makes mistakes, but only a few could forgive. An eye for an eye will make us all blind. ~ Morra Quatro

I thought you'd be interested in these things as a government man. Ain't you mixed up in the prices of things we eat or something? Ain't that it? Making them more costly or something. Making the grits cost more and the grunts less? ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Dualism ... Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life. ~ Aldous Huxley

and others all agreed that Acts was pretty much an historical novel, much like the so-called Apocryphal Acts, and that it was written in the second century. There is virtually no historical value to it, but it is rich in edifying propaganda, its author having extensively rewritten sources that seem to include Homer, Virgil, Euripides, Josephus, and the Septuagint, creating a revisionist version of early Christianity in the golden age of its origin. ~ Robert M. Price

What we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope. ~ George Eliot

The novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered moral if the highest values of a society are adherence to rules and traditional mores, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, and absolute ideas of right and wrong. Any society based on the latter will find novels inherently immoral and subversive. ~ Jane Smiley

Day after day we read about them, each new man more brilliant than the last. They were not just an all-star first team, but an all-star second team as well. There were counts kept on how many Rhodes scholars there were in the Administration, how many books by members of the new Administration (even the Postmaster, J. Edward Day, had written a novel, albeit a bad one). ~ David Halberstam

In a novel, language is your principal tool, you try to build pictures in the mind of the reader. When you write a screenplay, the language is just a transition, the final goal is a picture on the screen, it's the only thing the audience sees. ~ Philippe Claudel

A novel is a tricky thing to map. ~ Reif Larsen

What can he tell them? He, who knows nothing. Ibn al Mohammed has not planned atrocities nor committed them. He has never been in the presence of terrorists. Yet Satan's agents suspect him. He is dark-complected. His hair and beard are black. His name is Muslim. Body tall and slender, hands large, their fingers long and tapered. Dark eyes sunken in a narrow face. Irises like obsidian. He prays on hands and knees, forehead touching the floor. Thoughtlessly aligned, his cage obliges him to face a white plastic wall to bow toward Mecca. No matter; Ibn al Mohammed requires no sight of ocean or sky to know his place in the universe. He knows himself as one chosen, beloved of God. A man whose devotion will allow him to be saved.

Standing at the bars, he stares at the plastic wall. Modesty panel, they call it. The detainee wills nothing, attempts nothing, merely stares at blankness as his mind opens toward such signs as might appear. Something, nothing. However little, however great, whatever God vouchsafes is sufficient. The least sign is enough. A crease in the plastic. A shadow cast against its insensate skin, then fleeing, gone. A raindrop: trickling through the roof, one small drop might touch the wall, leave a transparent streak, a tear without sorrow to confirm his understanding of what is and must be. Recognition. Acceptance. By such a sign he will know he is not forsaken. That God notices and prepares a place.

He will not serve in the harvest. He will ~ John Lauricella I 2094 I

My father tried to get me to be around gay people a lot when I was young. He owned a gay bookstore and it had a lot of gay literature and art books and he wanted me to be taken care of by the young gays and lesbians who worked for him. ~ Margaret Cho

It took 17 years to get 'Rambling Rose' made from the time Calder Willingham wrote the script adapted from his novel. Ed Scherick, the producer, was interested in it. Martha Coolidge was interested in directing it. ~ Diane Ladd

But that there is a simple relation between literary and other fictions seems, if one attends to it, more obvious than has appeared. If we think first of modern fictions, it can hardly be an accident that ever since Nietzsche generalized and developed the Kantian insights, literature has increasingly asserted its right to an arbitrary and private choice of fictional norms, just as historiography has become a discipline more devious and dubious because of our recognition that its methods depend to an unsuspected degree on myths and fictions. After Nietzsche it was possible to say, as Stevens did, that 'the final belief must be in a fiction.' This poet, to whom the whole question was of perpetual interest, saw that to think in this way was to postpone the End--when the fiction might be said to coincide with reality--for ever; to make of it a fiction, an imaginary moment when 'at last' the world of fact and the mundo of fiction shall be one. Such a fiction--the last section of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction is, appropriately, the place where Stevens gives it his fullest attention--such a fiction of the end is like infinity plus one and imaginary numbers in mathematics, something we know does not exist, but which helps us to make sense of and to move in the world. Mundo is itself such a fiction. I think Stevens, who certainly thought we have to make our sense out of whatever materials we find to hand, borrowed it from Ortega. His general doctrine of fictions he took from Vaihinge ~ Frank Kermode

Newspapers will ultimately engross all literature. ~ Alphonse De Lamartine

So far I, at least, have no fault to find with implications of Hamilton's Federalism, but unfortunately his policy was in certain other respects tainted with a more doubtful tendency. ~ Herbert Croly

Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound. ~ James Allen

To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for them all. ~ Karl Kraus

If formality and courtesy take over the feelings . . . how silly and meaningless these things could become. And despite all this, I still take part in it! ~ Fumio Obata

But really it says everything that's wrong about the publishing industry, that a quarter of a million people bought and read a sex and shopping novel that wasn't even written by one of those footballer girlfriends, and yet most of the shortlisted titles on the Orange Prize, which is an award for women writers, don't even sell ten thousand copies. It's just not right. ~ Sarra Manning

I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

It is not opinions that man needs: it is TRUTH. It is not theology; it is God. It is not religion: it is Christ. It is not literature and science; but the knowledge of the free love of God in the gift of His only-begotten Son. ~ Horatius Bonar

Wealth protects and animates art and literature, as the dew enlivens the fields." Nonsense! Wealth animates art and literature, as the whistle of the master animates the dog and makes him wag his tail. ~ Various

The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences of form - all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void. ~ Joseph Campbell

A novel ... is a golden kettle into which you pour all of experience ... You can toss in great chunks of meat and fragrant bones and stock left over from the meals before. You can add fragments of character or the whole man. You can have scenes that fill a quarter of the book and others that flash by in a fleeting glance. In a novel there's nothing you can't do, if you do it with passion. ~ James A. Michener

Mark my trail... ~ Rudyard Kipling

...as long as we have the choice to read what we want, I suspect Twain and Homer and the rest will always be with us. The stoutest old writers ebb and flow in popularity; tastes and political correctness and educational trends also ebb and flow, and we have a tendency to embrace the short view because it makes better news stories. So the joy of literature may not be at a high water mark right now, and yet you can walk into the Target store of your choice and pick up Catcher in the Rye. Beauty floats, I guess, along with sorrow and hope. (http://www.wab.org/events/allofroches...) ~ Leif Enger

I no longer trusted the sun. I kept half an eye on it, night and day. I told myself that the sun would not go full rogue on us and send a pulse to suck our atmosphere away, but I had a hard time believing it.... ~ Brenda Marie Smith

Literature today is like elevator music for a narcoleptic. ~ Quentin R. Bufogle

You will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it ... Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. ~ C.S. Lewis

Amongst democratic nations, as well as elsewhere, the number of official appointments has in the end some limits; but amongst those nations, the number of aspirants is unlimited; it perpetually increases, with a gradual and irresistible rise in proportion as social conditions become more equal, and is only checked by the limits of the population. Thus, when public employments afford the only outlet for ambition, the government necessarily meets with a permanent opposition at last; for it is tasked to satisfy with limited means unlimited desires. It is very certain that of all people in the world the most difficult to restrain and to manage are a people of solicitants. Whatever endeavors are made by rulers, such a people can never be contented; and it is always to be apprehended that they will ultimately overturn the constitution of the country, and change the aspect of the State, for the sole purpose of making a clearance of places. The sovereigns of the present age, who strive to fix upon themselves alone all those novel desires which are aroused by equality, and to satisfy them, will repent in the end, if I am not mistaken, that they ever embarked in this policy: they will one day discover that they have hazarded their own power, by making it so necessary; and that the more safe and honest course would have been to teach their subjects the art of providing for themselves. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

There are no small churches, just small people. ~ Edwin Louis Cole

'Religion,' I should note, has a disputed etymology in Latin: some say it's from 'relegere,' meaning 'to reread', while others say it's from religare, meaning 'to connect' or 'link.' Literature is life's fastener. ~ Joshua Cohen

Of all literature I studied, the book that did more than any other to fire my enthusiasm was Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. ~ Kwame Nkrumah

I personally feel I still have so much to learn as a writer; each novel is better than the one before, just because I'm getting better at it. ~ Jonathan Dee

Believe in yourself & Love yourself. ~ Shradha Khanna

No man has an appreciation so various that his judgment is good upon all varieties of literary work. ~ Mark Twain

I remembered how de Man had said to us in class, 'don't confuse any of this literary theory with your lives' - how we hadn't believed him, how we had wanted our criticism to tell us how to think and how to speak and how to live. De Man made literature matter more than anything in the world and then said it was only literature. ~ Alice Kaplan

Our job as a writer is to represent the world and to bear witness to it. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night. ~ George Eliot

That complete statement which is literature. ~ Virginia Woolf

English. That was where I met him. ~ Andrew Koh

I have a plot, but not much happens. ~ Howard Nemerov

For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged. ~ Alice Walker

The contemporary crime novel is, at its best, a novel of character. That's where the suspense comes from. ~ Val McDermid

Of Human Bondage?"

Will said quickly, moving just out of sight for a moment and forcing Charlie to move to the edge of the dining area to see him. He tossed one arch look over his shoulder as he reached up to grab that book, and even knowing it was an act, Charlie felt himself tensing. His eyes fell on the leather cuff at Will's wrist, as they were probably meant to.

"Kinky."

Charlie's throat locked. "I'm not..."

"Into Bette Davis? I know, a lot of people find her scary at first, but after awhile you really start to get into her."

The completely reasonable tone was at odds with the wicked light in the kid's eyes, the way his lips were curved up, how he held his breath when Charlie blinked and frowned, replaying the insane words until they made sense. Until he remembered that Bette Davis was in the film version of that novel, until he could finally take his gaze off that wide leather band.

His face was burning.

"Smartass," he muttered, completely mystified when being called a smartass made Will hop in place, since Will had already made it clear that he had a brain under all that hair and glitter. ~ R. Cooper

In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed. ~ Elizabeth Bowen