Best 4069 quotes in «fiction quotes» category

There are a lot of ways for a novelist to create suspense, but also really only two: one a trick, one an art. The trick is to keep a secret. Or many secrets, even. In Lee Child’s books, Jack Reacher always has a big mystery to crack, but there are a series of smaller mysteries in the meantime, too, a new one appearing as soon as the last is resolved. J. K. Rowling is another master of this technique — Who gave Harry that Firebolt? How is Rita Skeeter getting her info? The art, meanwhile, the thing that makes “Pride and Prejudice” so superbly suspenseful, more suspenseful than the slickest spy novel, is to write stories in which characters must make decisions. “Breaking Bad” kept a few secrets from its audience, but for the most part it was fantastically adept at forcing Walter and Jesse into choice, into action. The same is true of “Freedom,” or “My Brilliant Friend,” or “Anna Karenina,” all novels that are hard to stop reading even when it seems as if it should be easy.

there are books which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

There are myriad kisses in a relationship: desperate ones as involuntary as breathing, stolen ones on crowded trains, ceremonial ones at the front door, routine ones as dispassionate as licking an envelope. It takes two to kiss, but does it take two to hold the memory?

There are no humans left. I should not be alone. I can’t help but wonder that. There were so many of us living. But time started growing young four years ago. It isn’t four years anymore. It’s a number I wouldn’t even be able to say. It feels like four years. It’s trapped in my tender memory as four years. It’s been an age. Multiple ages. It’s been lifetimes; every single lifetime that used to exist. I remember my mother screaming. I recall the doctors naming me as nurses wiped away her blood and covered her face with white. The end of the play. It’s been so long. Why am I alone?

There are moment of sadness and moment of joy. This is life.

There are monsters among us. I mean this quite literally.

There are objects made up of two sense elements, one visual, the other auditory—the colour of a sunrise and the distant call of a bird. Other objects are made up of many elements—the sun, the water against the swimmer's chest, the vague quivering pink which one sees when the eyes are closed, the feeling of being swept away by a river or by sleep. These second degree objects can be combined with others; using certain abbreviations, the process is practically an infinite one. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word, a word which in truth forms a poetic object, the creation of the writer. The fact that no one believes that nouns refer to an actual reality means, paradoxically enough, that there is no limit to the numbers of them.

There are only two things in life,' Bergé said. 'Love and beauty.

There are people who believe in the basic goodness of human nature. I believe in the basic evil of human nature. ~ Aarush Kashyap

There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

there are some some times in life where you have to let your feelings go and do what must be done

There are some wounds unreachable by words, some sins immune to apology.

There are tales that rise like the early sun, breathe, and take on a life of their own. There are ones that flow quietly and effortlessly until time forsakes them, but there are others that fight until they find their way to the edge of reality, as if coming straight out of a dream.

There are times when the unseen can be even more dangerous than what our eyes behold.

There are three types of emotional wounds: those that heal quickly, those that take a long time to heal, and those that remain with you until you die. I think one of the major roles of fiction is to explore as deeply and in as much detail as possible the wounds that remain. Because those are the scars that, for better or for worse, define and shape a person’s life.

There are two rules for success... 1. Never reveal everything you know.

...there are women who devote themselves entirely to their families, their husbands and children, and give up cultivating their femininity. Mother rebelled against that paradigm...[Mr. Gregory's Mother]

There'd always been an understanding between Havemercy and me; that we'd kill any man who came between us. I was holding up my end of the bargain now that she couldn't uphold hers.

The regrets about all she had let go flooded her. Where had all that enterprise gone? All that energy? Why had she never traveled? Or had more sex when she could? She had bleached and annihilated every waking moment of the last twenty years. Anything, rather than feel.

There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.

There is a difference between fiction and nonfiction deeper than technique or intention. I value both but genuinely believe that fiction can tell a larger truth.

There is a further trouble; no matter how meticulous the scientist, he or she cannot be separated from the experiment itself. Impossible to detach the observer from the observed. A great deal of scientific truth has later turned out to be its observer's fiction. It is irrational to assume that this is no longer the case.

There is another type of fiction which we create all the time to glorify ourselves and denounce others. We backbite more and praise less. We project ourselves as smarter than what we actually are and discredit the smartness of others. We cover our follies and believe that we are great, good and virtuous and brand others as evil and vicious.

There is at least one truth in every myth.

There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.

There is fact in every fiction and truth in every lie.

There is no right or wrong in war, only winners and losers. And you have shown your hand. No. She has shown her heart.

There is no man but carries in his breast the makings of a story, which, though never told, comes more home to him, than any the mind of another man can find and fashion in words ("The Watcher O' The Dead")

There is no reticence nor any limit to a 'Majique.' Only the unwillingness of the mind to open itself to the limitless power of possibilities that exist within the unbelievable.

There is no right or wrong, only what we believe is more right or more wrong

There is no shame in losing to the sword of the Prince. There is only shame in choosing not to follow Him.

There is no truth, only science and fiction.

There is nothing more amazing than being with the one you love.

There is nothing so sexy as a good-looking man in a good-looking pair of shorts.

There is only one happiness in life. To love, and to be loved

There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction. As Police Commissioner it was my duty to deal with all kinds of squalid misery and hideous and unspeakable infamy, and I should have been worse than a coward if I had shrunk from doing what was necessary; but there would have been no use whatever in my reading novels detailing all this misery and squalor and crime, or at least in reading them as a steady thing. Now and then there is a powerful but sad story which really is interesting and which really does good; but normally the books which do good and the books which healthy people find interesting are those which are not in the least of the sugar-candy variety, but which, while portraying foulness and suffering when they must be portrayed, yet have a joyous as well as a noble side.

There is nothing to me but you. I know it’s pathetic but, oh darling, it’s true.

There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.

There is only one misery . . . not to be saints.

there is something intriguing about knowing how things are going to turn out, but being constantly surprised about how they'll get there.

There is something so degrading - at least, one would think that there were something so degrading in the practice of writing as a trade - that anyone who has once earned a livelihood, or part of it, obviously and openly, by popular writing, can never be seriously regarded by any great number of people. And then, of course, "he does too much.

There is truth in stories. There is truth in one of your paintings, or in a sunset or a couplet from Homer. Fiction is truth, even if it is not a fact. If you believe only in facts and forget stories, your brain will live, but your heart will die. hehe skl kanami dan

There Peter sat in the new sunlight, plaiting the straw for baskets, until he saw the thing he had been taught most to fear advancing silently along the lea of an outcrop of rock.

There’s a German term- heimweh, homesickness. It’s a powerful sensation, like a narcotic. A yearning from home, but for something more- a past self, perhaps. A lost self. When I first saw you on the street, Katya, I felt such a sensation… I have no idea why

There's a growing trade in fakes, you know. Does that concern you? He paused, but he didn't seem surprised not to get an answer. I've never seen one - well, as far as I know - but I'm curious. Could one really tell the difference? Novels, they call them. They must be much cheaper to produce. You can copy them, you see. use the same story over and over, and as long as you're careful how you sell them, you can get away with it. It makes one wonder who would write them. People who enjoy imagining misery, I suppose. People who have no scruples about dishonesty. People who can spend days writing a long sad lie without going insane.

There’s an immense dramatic possibility in describing that universe. The books, for me, were an enormous relief in that sense of how they were written to allow primary emotion, elemental emotion, to matter enormously but to give the thing an extraordinary flow so you don’t notice at what point that you’re actually overwhelmed by this. There’s no showiness, at all. It’s the opposite of showiness. I think, if it was a painting, it could be very grey abstract, almost, with some lines and very, very beautiful. But you wouldn’t have a notion of where the beauty was. (Talking about the short stories of Alistair MacLeod, who he discovered while working on The Modern Library.)

There's more to life than cause and effect.

There's nothing quite as funny as someone else's misery - Cassel Sharpe

There’s nothing to be scared of, right Akhol?” He said nothing as he stepped toward the rushing water that rolled around a big rock and was swallowed whole by impenetrable darkness. “Right?” Andrew repeated, his voice swallowed by the sound of rushing water. Akhol didn’t respond again. He tapped a foot above the water before he stepped in and disappeared beneath the surface in one fluid motion.

There’s something about her, I remember thinking, a little mysterious. I tried to absorb the feeling for as long as I could before I went back to work. I tried not to think about it. Feelings throw everything off.