Best 4069 quotes in «fiction quotes» category

I've never been this dirty. I've never been this sweaty and disgusting. I've never been this afraid, this thirsty, this alone". "I haven't been a good leader, but--people are counting on me to take them to safety. I don't know if I'm twelve or twenty or if I'm twenty and I don't think age matters anymore------- There is a way out. I will find a way out.

I've learned that the most unbelievable is the most believable.

I wake up and look at that bridge, try to count the red taillights I see heading east every morning, a kind of rosary as I pray for another crisis to dwarf the one defining us right now.

I want art that makes the world seem more unreal. I want fiction that can crumble the world and build it back into something new.

I wanted to be something else, anything else. I could be a snail on a leaf, or the leaf itself. I could be a pig in the mud or a cow grazing in the field. I could be a drop of rain that fell from the heavens, or a shimmering fish deep in the ocean. But I was human and I had feelings

I wanted stories, and I wanted them always, and I wanted the experience that only fiction could give me: I wanted to be inside them.

I wanted to give you something that would last forever. Something that would surpass the world, that would still be alive and bright even after you passed away. Something beautiful. For your eyes and smile only. But I never found it. All I could give you is words. Words which were as fleeting as the heartbeats that shook my soul whenever you looked my way.

I wanted to survive—not for my kind, but for trust, for friendship, for another being. (Eric)

I wanted to protect her, and, if I couldn’t do that, I’d at least be there for her. (Eric)

I want to be undone by you. I want to be the one to come to pieces in your arms, to forget there is anything in this world but the two of us.

I want the real story, the one that won’t make it into the history books or the scientific journals.” “And you think I’m the man to tell it, do you?” “If you were actually there, you are most definitely the person to tell it. You’re absolutely right. There have been plenty of stories. The trouble is, every account is different. Most of them are second or third hand. I don’t know . . . I guess I figured, maybe since you weren’t in such a rush to tell your version, it might be the closest to the truth.” Garvey chuckled heartily. “Well, I can’t argue with that logic, son. Despite my choice of reading materials . . .” he nodded towards the adventure novel he’d set down, a recent translation of the French novel by Jules Verne, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, “I’ve never been one for unnecessary embellishment. You want the God’s honest truth? In this particular case, there’s no need. It’s a hell of a goddamn story.” I was already flipping open a notebook and licking the tip of a sharpened pencil to take notes. I may have been salivating.

I want to be the best race horse around when I grow up, Mama. You can be, Charlie, as long as you are willing to try your best and not give up when you have a bad day.

I want to breathe God, I want to reach God, I want to touch God… I want to be God! No! These are only the nonsense ravings of a weak and perverse mind.

I want to confess. I thought that her story was comprised of scenes. I thought the tragedy could be glamorous and her grief could be undone by a sunnier future. I thought we could pinpoint dramatic events on a time line and call it a life. But I was wrong.

I want to... have fun with writing again. Enjoy my work, enjoy playing with the language and characters like a sculptor plays with clay. But there's this manic focus on numbers--how many books have you written and how many have you sold and it's all push, push, push, and no time for reflection--but at heart, books are about dreaming... which is just the opposite. So I don't know... M.M. Bennetts comment to Nancy Bilyeau as related in Nancy's tribute "M.M. Bennetts: The Closest Friend I Never Met

I want to rewind the clock, take back the night when the world shattered. I want to erase everything that went wrong.

I want you to grab hold of the brass spindles and don’t let go.” When she did as he required, he spread her legs wider. “Hold tight, baby. This is going to feel so good.

I was a happy boy until one day my girlfriend became invisible!!!!! Yes, she really became invisible!!!!!!

I was a slave to my own darkness, believing in my false created, thought-identified identity so much that it forged what felt like a wasteland of a reality.

I was an utterance in absentia. I was a forgotten word, uttered and mislaid long ago. I was the word that existed because there was another word that was my opposite, and without it I was nothing. I gained meaning only by acknowledging that possible other. Nida

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.

I was glad my father was an eye-smiler. It meant he never gave me a fake smile because it's impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren't feeling twinkly yourself. A mouth-smile is different. You can fake a mouth-smile any time you want, simply by moving your lips. I've also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it. So watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you but his eyes stay the same. It's sure to be a phony.

I was hoping against hope he'd refill his Prozac so we could be in love again, but, sadly, that never happened.

I was glad there was another me. I had a better chance of surviving childhood. The other me inside my head shared the fear and anxiety and kept me in check. Without the soft voice constantly reminding me of who of us would be dead, I am sure I could have become a natural-born killer. When other girls’ thoughts were of new dresses and summer sandals, I thought about murder and already had a list. Daddy and the blue devils were at the top of it.

I was its skin, its movement, its shape, its god, its creator, its destroyer. And you thought Dexter was bad. The Bridgeman arrives soon.

I was lost in my own little world, devouring the pages of my book, taking slow sips of my lukewarm coffee, when an old man with a kind face and a gentle smile approached me. He had silver hair, and he wore a white button-down shirt, and brown trousers. He offered me his hand, and I recall closing my book in haste, taking his hand, and following him across the room, like I knew him. We stopped at a table where a man who looked like he was in his mid-thirties sat alone, immersed in the pages of his book. The old man leads me to the empty chair next to the stranger, and without hesitation, I sat down. Regardless of how perplexed I was by what was going on, I didn’t ask any questions. I didn’t want to. I was too amused by what was happening to me.

I was never good enough for my mum and she never let me forget it" I whisper out just as we make it to the entrance of their building "Ryan doesn't speak the words, but sometimes he makes me feel that way.

I wasn't writing home. I wasn't writing a death letter, either. I was writing a death journal, a piece of fiction meant for my family and my fiancee, Sara.

I was slightly thankful when Mom finally came out and unlocked the car. It was warm and toasty inside and it smelt like home. There was not the slightest smell of something that didn’t belong home.

I was somewhere between angry and turned-on.

I wasn’t sure what was worse: being oblivious or living within reality. (Eric)

I was so enthused with literature -- not stuck on literature, but in love with letters -- that I was easily inclined to bring all the conversations round to works I had read or fictitious characters from my readings about whom I loved to talk

I was trying to have an insight, and all I could think of was that I'd backed myself into a corner, and the corner was me.

I was thinking that preparing to meet someone you don’t think you’ll like is a lot like pulling a tooth you do like, in that you’ll be very sweaty and know very well (at least at that moment in time) that life would be far grander if you went in another direction.

I went to say no, but I winced as I pulled my tooth out of my lip. I was absolutely hopeless. In a two minute period my front curls had started to go straight due to my constant brushing them behind my ears and I was pretty sure my lip was bleeding. Frustrated I pushed myself off of the couch with a huff and walked around the glass coffee table to head for the kitchen. “I've made you angry.” “No.” Darren got up and cut me off in the middle of the room. “Yes, I did. You're angry with me.” “No, not with you.” “Then what's wrong?” “I'm angry with myself.

I will not be a victim. I will not think like a victim. I am going to avenge all those little girls. I am going to win.

I wish life were a fiction novel. Then everyone would have to do what I say.

…I wonder what actually this hospital is, why I am in it and who I am. I have no time to find out. I die, with my arms stretched towards the spotlights. Then whiteness. My body is still there somewhere… Buried in the extremely bright lights of empty hope.

I wish I could run into the world’s arms. Linger within the spaces between nothing. I wish I could filter out of existence. To live quietly without dying. I wish I could be cherished by life itself. To speak and sing volumes without lying to myself.

Listen." Jennifer reverted, "I didn't mean anything by all of that before. I understand what you were trying to do and ..." She struggled for the right words. "Sweetie, like love, people don't live inside of life, life lives inside of you. Open yourself up to it and there's no stopping your heart.

I wonder, what kind of life would I have had if it hadn’t been for my mother’s tea-and-cookie parties? Perhaps it’s because of them that I’ve never thought of women as my enemies, as territories I have to conquer, but always as allies and friends - which I believe is the reason why they were friendly to me in turn. I’ve never met those she-devils you hear about: they must be too busy with those men who look upon women as a fortress they have to attack, lay waste and left in ruins.

Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.

Literature is the opiate of the educated masses.

Literature is a virus.

Literature is the real life of imaginary people.

Literature takes us away from our grey everyday experience, but brings us back enriched with new sensibilities.

Live in your dreams, not your past.

Live life to the fullest and never forget the people that supported you along the way.

Living is worth the effort if only because without life we could not read or imagine stories.

Living in that castle was like being condemned to Hell before I’d even had the opportunity to sin.