Poetic Fiction Quotes

It isn't a perfect place. There are no perfect places. But nobody cares about perfection when there are sand castles to build and kites to chase, children that are being born, old hearts that are giving in. ~ Lauren DeStefano

The sand stretched out gray and ghostlike and illuminated, a column of light leading forward. It was like something a dead person would see, a tunnel leading toward heaven. ~ Lucy Christopher

Although this is poetic fiction, it contains hidden moral truths worthy of being heeded and understood and imitated, ... ~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

There were tiny stars behind my eyelids, a whole galaxy of tiny, spinning stars. ~ Lucy Christopher

Bright spots move around him like someone shook the stars from a blanket and they all went flying. ~ Lauren DeStefano

He is spent. His mind is mercury again, its brief surge of humanity melting into an oily residue on its surface, and he no longer understands the feelings he felt in that strange moment on the overpass.
But he did feel them. They did happen. They rest on the murky seabed of his mind, buried under sand and silt and miles of grey waves. Patient seeds waiting for light. ~ Isaac Marion

Ódinn couldn't tear his gaze from the small featured face, the red cheeks and delicate lips that she pursed shut as if to ensure she wouldn't say anything to disappoint her father. ~ Yrsa Sigurðardóttir

There's this anomaly that happens sometimes with twins. It occurs in the womb when the fetuses are growing too closely to each other. The stronger twin develops normally, while the weaker twin crumples and is encased by the body of the stronger twin, where it becomes a parasite. The result is a single child, plagued by a twin-shaped fossil inside. Like a tumor.
In death Rose became Linden's parasitic twin. They were two separate organisms once, growing steadily beside each other. Two pulses. Two brains. But she has crumpled and died, and still he carries her inside himself. She goes where he goes, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, a shadow behind his ribs. ~ Lauren DeStefano

It was like I'd stepped out into an afterlife. Only there were no angels. ~ Lucy Christopher

The deep blue of your eyes had secrets. I wanted them. ~ Lucy Christopher

It feels as though we're going in slow motion. I think we'll never get away. But eventually the Ferris wheel is far enough away that it could be a moving constellation. ~ Lauren DeStefano

I feel unburdened, and after a while I start to imagine that the divan is a boat moving over the ocean. Sunken cities play music beneath the waves. The ghosts are stirring. ~ Lauren DeStefano

I wrapped my arms around me as tightly as I could, and stared up at the stars. Had I not been so cold and wanting to escape so badly, I could have stared at them forever: They were amazingly beautiful, so dense and bright. My eyes could get lost up there if I left them looking long enough. [ ... ] They swallowed me up. They were like a hundred thousand tiny candles, sending out hope. ~ Lucy Christopher

I watch the ashes swim around like dandelion puffs, making swirls where bodies and walls once stood. ~ Lauren DeStefano

It's been a long time since humans were prey animals. A hundred thousand years or so. But buried deep in our genes the memory remains: the awareness of the gazelle, the instinct of the antelope. The wind whispers through the grass. A shadow flits between the trees. And up speaks the little voice that goes. Shhhh, it's close now. Close. ~ Rick Yancey

There were tiny rainbows in that glass. I turned it so a rainbow danced across my hand. ~ Lucy Christopher

Childhood is a long, long road, from which that dark whispering forest of death seems an impossible destination. ~ Lauren DeStefano

I remember the lights turning into blurs of blazing fire. I remember the air-conditioning chilling my arms. The smell of coffee smudging into the smell of eucalyptus. ~ Lucy Christopher

The sun was bobbing on the horizon, just peeking over. Its light shimmered on the sand behind you, making your body look like it was glowing ... like it had a kind of aura. ~ Lucy Christopher

Was that - did she just grin at me? To me? A moment of stillness in this moment of pause. Without speaking, we let our gazes wander slow, groping to confirm relief in the other. There's a subdued excitement for the oncoming sharing of whatever's waiting for us behind that heavy iron door, exclusive - two solitary embers, isolated in their separate pits, far away but fanned by the same wind, the same night, alone with the night, their respective camps all gone to sleep, flaring softly cradled calling, out against the great dark backdrop of the great unknown. ~ Patrick Bryant

I didn't want the person standing there, beside the bed, to have the same face I'd found so attractive at the airport. But you were there all right: the blue eyes, blondish hair, and tiny scar. Only you didn't look beautiful this time. Just evil. ~ Lucy Christopher

I wipe at her cheeks with the cuff of my green sweater because it's the softest thing I can think of. It catches her tears without absorbing them, and they hang between the fibers like stars. ~ Lauren DeStefano

When I call his name, it's a sound almost entirely out of my control. It soars over the crowd and hits him. Even from where I'm standing, I can tell that he recognized my voice. Hastily he unwinds himself from the girl, stands to attention like an animal sensing danger. And I try to call him again, but that word, that name, was all I had the energy for. I barely have the strength left to stand.
I wait helplessly for him to find the sound, and when he does, when his heterochromatic eyes meet mine, my mouth forms the word again, but just barely. The girl at his side disappears. The crowd blurs into senseless shapes and colors. I can't feel my heart or my body or the heat of the flames.
I can only see his face - his bewildered, beautifully familiar face. ~ Lauren DeStefano

Ty?" I said, trying out your name, liking the way it sounded. "So what's it like anyway? Australia?"
You smiled then, and your whole face changed with it. It kind of lit up, like there were sunbeams coming from inside you.
"You'll find out," you said. ~ Lucy Christopher

It radiates out from him like a cloud of ghosts, countless hands clutching at the air, reaching out for ... something. ~ Isaac Marion

Do not rob yourself of happiness.
Do not hold yourself hostage.
Do not miss out on living a well-fulfilled life.
Life is supposed to be lived - each day is progress. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

While it can be pleasurable to move speedily through a work of fiction, there's a different sort of pleasure to be had in lingering, backtracking, rereading the same page. ~ Joanna Scott

Aaron was beside himself grabbing his keys and running out of his office leaving everyone staring at him. He heard Becca call his name but he didn't have the time, Nia needed him and he had to go now! He felt like he was suffocating as he started the car and pushed the gas down as far as it would go. This guardian bond thing was more intense than he ever thought possible. ~ Shayna Varadeaux

The rose leaves its remains on the ground,
Its petals to be noticed one last time-
As it melts into the ground
With its fellow kind. ~ LaNona Walker

If there is but one pearl of wisdom I have to impart to you, after all my observations here thus far, it is do not take yourself too seriously. Because when you get here, you might just find that you are not exactly who or what you thought you were. ~ Natasha Rendell

And still, even when he'd told her how he felt about her, and that he wanted their fake relationship to be real, she'd held herself back out of fear that their friends-to-lovers story was too good to be anything but fiction. ~ Bella Andre

Science fiction is essentially a kind of fiction in which people learn more about how to live in the real world, visiting imaginary worlds unlike our own, in order to investigate by way of pleasurable thought-experiments how things might be done differently. ~ Brian Stableford

There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on
a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion. ~ Graham Swift

The adventure of the sun is the greatest natural drama by which we live ... ~ Henry Beston

Fact-checking is so boring compared to writing fiction. ~ Francine Prose

Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of Homo sapiens watched his First Contact stride away across the Raman plain, totally indifferent to his presence. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

Don't do lunchmeat, kids. Bologna. Not even once. ~ Jon Konrath

If you live your life with passion, every second will become an adventure. ~ Marie Guillaume

I gazed up at the sky. I was in a tiny boat, on a vast ocean. No wind, no waves, just me floating there. Adrift on the open sea..
..A tiny boat cut loose from the fiction of the ship. ~ Haruki Murakami

I woke with sweat beading across my forehead and my hands balled into fists clutching the sheet over my eyes. The dreams. They were back. Haunting me relentlessly. I thought they were gone ... I should've known better. (Rayne) ~ Kimberly Brockman

Can't stop what's coming. Ain't no waiting on you. That's vanity. ~ Cormac McCarthy

The woman was sexy, lethal and very confident. The sound of her laughter was enticing. Intriguing. It played along his nerve endings and sent an electrical current running through his bloodstream. He was on the verge of death and he'd never felt more alive. ~ Christine Feehan

A laconic and highly entertaining" novel. "The characters are strong, each showing major evidence of being a product of their respective cultures. Overall, the story is a strong one, with a couple of well-executed twists that succeed in surprising the reader."

- Publishers Weekly judge for the 2014 ABNA Contest, Two Brides for Ewan de Buchan


"I love historical romance novels and this one right off the bat based on the plot/hook made me want to read more. I devoured this...and re-read it twice. It seems like the author has a very good handle on the time period in which this novel is set."

- 2014 ABNA Contest judge, Two Brides for Ewan de Buchan


"I think this is really well crafted and interesting. The plot/hook caught me from the first paragraph. The characters are well done and I really loved the novelist's attention to historical detail...It's a really great romance novel, and is of publication quality. This novelist has a real future in writing romance (or even general fiction) books."

- 2014 ABNA Contest judge, Two Brides for Ewan de Buchan ~ E. Elizabeth Watson

If you have ever felt slightly nauseous walking through an aged care facility, puckered your face against a smell, observed a grown woman clutching a dolly with desperation, felt a flood of melancholy as death fills your view – then you are in a perfect position to be a supportive psychotherapist for those whose lives are peppered with this everyday. ~ Felicity Chapman

You ask me what you will be there. But what are you here? What are you creatures of Fantastica? Dreams, poetic inventions, characters in a neverending story. Do you think you're real? Well yes, here in your world you are. But when you been through the Nothing, you won't be real anymore. You'll be unrecognizable. And you will be in another world. In that world, you Fantasticans won't be anything like yourselves. You will bring delusion and madness into the human world. ~ Michael Ende

If the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery, because for this kind of writer, the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted. Such a writer will be interested in what we don't understand rather than in what we do. He will be interested in possibility rather than probability. He will be interested in characters who are forced out to meet evil and grace and who act on a trust beyond themselves - whether they know clearly what it is they act upon or not. ~ Flannery O'Connor

I'm making out with a dead girl in my dreams. I'm screwing women I have no business screwing. I'm pushing away the one person who actually gives a damn about me. It's like the Bermuda Triangle of heartache and I'm sinking fast. ~ Faith Sullivan

As sneakily addictive as a game of Pong (which was named, we're told, after the narrator's dad), this zany zip-line of a novel takes the piss out of the Asian-American 'good immigrant' story. Full of charming antiheroes making comically bad choices, the story dazzles us with its absurdity, which makes its eventual wisdom--about lineage, ethnicity, and the meaning of family--all the more wonderfully surprising. ~ Michael Lowenthal

At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the alps with the indifferent eye of those who always live there. ~ Angela Carter

Regrets are about decisions that you know you should have done different. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

They say that right before you die your whole life flashes before you – a medley of your own personal greatest hits. Well then, I must be about to live, because events that haven't happened yet are constantly pushing themselves into my head. ~ Emlyn Chand

When I write fiction, I have the illusion of being able to control these fictional worlds and these characters, and to make them say what I want them to say. Of course, the problem is that it is an illusion, and by the end of it you realize that you're not in control of it at all; the characters have taken over, and they're driving the vehicle. ~ Ruth Ozeki

Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word. ~ Charles Stross

Wake early, take more! ~ Julie Elise Landry

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading ~ Vladimir Nabokov