Best 4069 quotes in «fiction quotes» category

The destruction of something beautiful can appear so entertaining.

The details of what we call our lives go sometimes to form patterns of meaning not unlike those to be found in our preferred sort of fiction.

The difference between nonfiction and fiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.

The door wasn’t closing. Shiloh’s spirit opened up as she considered the possibilities.

The epiphany machine will not discover anything about you that you do not, in some way, already know. But think for a moment about surprise. What is surprising is never what is revealed but the grace with which it has been hidden.

The entire history of mankind is problem solving, or science fiction swallowing ideas, digesting them, and excreting formulas for survival. You can't have one without the other. No fantasy, no reality. No studies concerning loss, no gain. No imagination, no will. No impossible dreams: No possible solutions.

The exhausted earth groaned and quivered under the monotonous glare of the sun. Spirals of heat rose from the ground as if from molten lava. A panting lizard crawled painfully over the fevered rock in search of a shady crevice. Cattle and dogs cringed under the scanty shade of the trees and waited for the rain to deliver them from the heat and thirst. Instead the heat grew more intense and oppressive each day, singeing and stifling all living things with an invisible sheet of fire, which only the rain could put out. The drought had persisted for over a month.

The extent of creativity to which I admire in an individual is his ability to be richly creative while still, in a way, telling the truth. It is the fool who creates only his own lies, and the bore who simply repeats what he is told.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between the lightening bug and the lightening ~Mark Twain

The difference between real life and a story is that life has significance, while a story must have meaning. The former is not always apparent, while the latter always has to be, before the end.

The difference between vampires and angels? Angels are real.

The features of character are carved out of adversity.

The dominoes of fate are falling down as we are speaking, and Ferriar knows what will happen when the last one crashes down.

The Door of No Return - real and metaphoric as some places are, mythic to those of us who are scattered in the Americas today. To have one’s belonging lodged in a metaphor is voluptuous intrigue; to inhabit a trope; to be a kind of fiction. To live in the Black Diaspora I think is to live in a fiction - a creation of empires, and also self-creation. It is to be being living inside and outside herself. It is to apprehend the the sign one makes yet to be unable to escape it except in radiant moments of ordinariness made like art. To be a fiction in search of its most resonant metaphor then is even more intriguing.

The feeling, all encompassing, safe and warm like a blanket permanently draped over her shoulders, follows her around. She takes it into the shower, to meals with her mother and sister, to work as she reads out the news script, her voice never faltering.

The fictitious kleptomaniac's only crime was stealing imaginations

The first draft doesn't have to be perfect, but it does have to be written!

The formula for this brand of "historical" writing is to put the public on the inside; to let them feel the palpitations of royal and imperial lovers and to overhear their lispings and cooings. It can be argued that a man has to live somewhere, and that if his own time is so cut up by rapid change that he can't find a cranny big enough to relax in, then he must betake himself to the past. That is certainly one motive in the production of historical romance, from Sir Walter Scott to Thornton Wilder. But mainly this formula works as a means of flattery. The public is not only invited inside but encouraged to believe that there is nothing inside that differs from its own thoughts and feelings. This reassurance is provided by endowing historical figures with the sloppiest possible minds. The great are "humanized" by being trivial. The debunking school began by making the great appear as corrupt, or mean and egotistical. The "humanizers" have merely carried on to make them idiotic. "Democratic" vanity has reached such proportions that it cannot accept as human anything above the level of cretinous confusion of mind of the type popularized by Hemingway's heroes. Just as the new star must be made to appear successful by reason of some freak of fortune, so the great, past or present, must be made to seem so because of the most ordinary qualities, to which fortune adds an unearned trick or idea.

The fruth is the truth revealed by stipulating what the meaning of 'is' is.

The Gates of Heaven and the Gates of Hell are the same gates. It just depends which side you're standing on when you walk through.

The girl I’d been just an hour ago was gone; she’d been obliterated. I had no idea who I was, now.

The gossip will kill your Great Grandmother.

The great thing about writing fiction is that you can do whatever the fuck you want, go as far as you are willing to go, and laugh at the people who take it seriously.

The Hive Mind lifted their dream up into the blue and blazing air of summer, where the foragers swooped in daring and elegant flight. It took the bees down to the flowers in a kaleidoscope of beauty and wonder as if the foragers shared their skills, dreaming how to pack a pannier with rapid economy, how to tickle a flower to yield the sweetest nectar, and how to watch where the hoverflies gathered to tell that air was safe from Myriad.... The Cluster buzzed as it released its anxiety, and then every kin relaxed their minds and their knowledge poured out with joyful abandon, sharing detail after detail of their beloved communal life. The Hive Mind absorbed it all, and enlarged.

The human heart Is unknowable. But in my birthplace The flowers still smell The same as always.

The humanities, in contrast, emphasise the crucial importance of intersubjective entities, which cannot be reduced to hormones and neurons. To think historically means to ascribe real power to the contents of our imaginary stories. Of course, historians don’t ignore objective factors such as climate changes and genetic mutations, but they give much greater importance to the stories people invent and believe. North Korea and South Korea are so different from one another not because people in Pyongyang have different genes to people in Seoul, or because the north is colder and more mountainous. It’s because the north is dominated by very different fictions. Maybe someday breakthroughs in neurobiology will enable us to explain communism and the crusades in strictly biochemical terms. Yet we are very far from that point. During the twenty-first century the border between history and biology is likely to blur not because we will discover biological explanations for historical events, but rather because ideological fictions will rewrite DNA strands; political and economic interests will redesign the climate; and the geography of mountains and rivers will give way to cyberspace. As human fictions are translated into genetic and electronic codes, the intersubjective reality will swallow up the objective reality and biology will merge with history. In the twenty-first century fiction might thereby become the most potent force on earth, surpassing even wayward asteroids and natural selection. Hence if we want to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly enough. We must also decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world.

The human spirit craves for mastery over its carnal shell.

The imagination is a wild and dangerous forest that is impossible to know the full might of.

The immediate difficulty, Florence realised while riding the high rail back to Brooklyn, was how to break the news to her parents, even if she could convince them that being a chaperone to six foreign men was a legitimate occupation for a twenty-three-year-old girl. What choice did she have? A paycheck could not win a girl’s independence

the illusion that power lies within the hands of the common man is more important than legitimate efficiency within the government.

The impatient, feckless reader, posessed of no glimmer of intellectual or historical curiosity, should do an old historian a favor and skip the next few pages, proceeding directly to the Silence itself (Part III). I would assume that, in these horrid modern times, that will include most of you. Of course, those readers least likely to read these footnotes, and thus least likely to appreciate the next few pages, will skip this note and bore themselves upon the ennui of history .

The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well. (Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.)

Their encounter had formed a strange chemical bond. Mitch, a hardened ruffian, had opened up the prison of his soul to her. And Kika, who led a bitterly puritanical existence, had started to make love to him on her sofa.

The joy I’m feeling is too intense to express.I don’t know what’ll happen next month, or even next week. What I know is that we both want to try.

The lilac moon came high an altitude from mine to clasp its beauty,yet next to my bosom hide, lies she,like ten thousand silver moons illumine;and her soul’s music showered words as she spoke wide.

The line between fiction and fact is at times factual and at times fictional

...the locale did not make him think of her, nor did most things. He felt no negativity about the time they had spent together, but simply did not dwell on it much. She had been a seat filler, memorable as the smiling face of a beautiful girl in the window of a passing train, inspiring a fleeting moment of joy and promise, immediately forgotten with the opening of that day’s newspaper.

The love that we feel for each other is not about the worldly things, those materialistic possessions, or great looks either. It’s about the breath I hold at your sheer sight. It’s about the constant drumming of my heart when you come near me, making me aware of your control on me, and how my senses crave for more of you. My love for you is ‘you’, and it will still take me eternity to figure out more of it!

The marks we leave are too often scars.

The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have the right to punish anybody else.

The monkey liked most humans. They left food cans outside their homes for his family to rummage through in the morning sun. Some yelled and threw sticks, but were slow and didn’t bite. Humans were mostly harmless.

The more I learn about life and people, the more I realise that everyone has a story and everyone’s story is the biggest in their own mind.” - Laylla Jonson

The more we prepare for war, the more we make it a reality. Yet, it would seem, to prepare for war may also be the best and possibly the only way to avoid it.’ – Govinda Shauri, The Aryavarta Chronicles - Kurukshetra

The morning was brisk and the coffee was hot and roasted with little gurgles in the room. Rosie hadn’t moved, but she let out a tiny snore every now and again that made everything perfect.

The mother who lay in the grave, was the mother of my infancy; the little creature in her arms, was myself, as I had once been, hushed for ever on her bosom.

The music spread out of the f-shaped holes, spilling over the floor, easing and pulling, and Quincy gave herself to the personality of the sound. It was safe. It was straightforward. The sound of the violin was all the humanity that Quincy could stand.

The nation has been turned upside down and inside out. The country that was once discovered by people seeking religious freedom is now oppressing religious rights. It has been a slow train rumbling down the track of destruction since the 1960's. It started with the removal of the Bible from our public schools. Next the generation known as the 'love generation' opened the door for the approval of sex outside of marriage. For every ten years since then, it's been a slippery slope of materialism, I got mine, what can you do for me, and money is power. "We as a nation have stopped focusing on God and family and replaced them with money and success. Parents are teaching their children to do whatever it takes to get ahead...just don't get caught. If you do, find someone to blame it on.

The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend.

The northern star changes its position every ten thousand years, but friendships can last for all eternity. — RJPeters

Then he was there, turned half toward her with a guarded expression etched across his face. She didn't stop or even slow her step. When she reached him, she grabbed the front of his shirt in both fists, pulling him to her, pushing her mouth up into his. Heat swirled through her as she pulled his face even closer, tighter. His arms wound around her and their bodies melded with a rightness she didn't bother to question. Her lips filled with the sweetness of his mouth and Tamani held her against him as if he could somehow pull her inside him, make her part of him. And for a moment, she did feel like a part of him. As if their kiss bridged the gap between the two worlds, even if only for that one brief, sparkling moment. A sigh that held the weight of years shuddered out of Tamani as their faces drew apart. "Thank you," Tamani whispered, almost too quiet to be heard.