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

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

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

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 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 festive music died down and the granite pillars were replaced with rotted wooden beams as he continued down the alleyways. The scent of fresh flowers turned to mold, and the colorful mosiacs of honor and nobility were nonexistent. Run-down tenements were shadowed by its surrounding buildings, as if the capital itself wanted to conceal its existence.

The final crushing failure. He has failed as a teacher, a writer, a husband and a father. He had even failed as a drunk.

The Female Orgasm. The Big O. That elusive, reclusive Loch Ness of the labia. Does it prove the existence of God, or just His twisted sense of humor?

The features of character are carved out of adversity.

The Ferryman will transport us across the moat,” Chris informed. “Yeah. This seems legit,” Gabriella quipped as Chris helped her onto the boat. Andrew followed behind. “Are you sure this isn’t a trick?” Egnatious asked. Again, uncertainty filtered into Chris’s blue eyes, but he nodded anyway. “This is the only way.

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 sight I beheld when I first awakened was a pair of eyes filled with pure adoration and a joyful grin that shone more brightly than the afternoon sun. Though he hadn’t spoken a single word, I knew exactly who he was. He was my creator … my Lord … my God.

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

The first story I have to tell is not exactly true, but it isn't exactly false, either.

The first thing you lose when you die is your motor skills.

The first time Kiya met Hapi was over a year ago. On that day, she was at the temple - not to sell pigeons and bread as usual, but to pray and offer sacrifices on the altar of Horus - the God of protection.

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 French have a penchant for absolutism, for thinking that things are all one way or all another, which is why their politics are marked by a general inability to compromise and why they tend to hold their personal opinions until the bitter end, even after they have clearly lost an argument.

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

The four of us stood in silence as we watched the surrounding girls play games or gossip. It was almost as if I did not belong here anymore. It was like I was peering in through a window from a completely different world.

The funny thing about games and fictions is that they have a weird way of bleeding into reality. Whatever else it is, the world that humans experience is animated with narratives, rituals, and roles that organize psychological experience, social relations, and our imaginative grasp of the material cosmos. The world, then, is in many ways a webwork of fictions, or, better yet, of stories. The contemporary urge to “gamify” our social and technological interactions is, in this sense, simply an extension of the existing games of subculture, of folklore, even of belief. This is the secret truth of the history of religions: not that religions are “nothing more” than fictions, crafted out of sociobiological need or wielded by evil priests to control ignorant populations, but that human reality possesses an inherently fictional or fantastic dimension whose “game engine” can — and will — be organized along variously visionary, banal, and sinister lines. Part of our obsession with counterfactual genres like sci-fi or fantasy is not that they offer escape from reality — most of these genres are glum or dystopian a lot of the time anyway — but because, in reflecting the “as if” character of the world, they are actually realer than they appear.

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 glory of doing something great is not what keeps me going. It’s the grief of leaving something necessary undone.

… the greatest mystery, the greatest wonder of creation is that we are capable of both relentless reason and boundless love ... It is not about what we are, but what we can become. – Govinda Shauri

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 greatest happiness is a quiet kind. It’s the tender understanding that we’re living in a very strange place full of strange creatures. And there’s quite a bit of wonder in that.

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 harder the access, the sweeter the find.

The gray paint peels off the wall in odd and beautiful patterns, each cracked polygon of paint a snowflake of decay.

[T]he great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction is that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities.

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 heart also knows things, and so does the imagination. Thank God. If not for heart and imagination, the world of fiction would be a pretty seedy place. It might not even exist at all.

The heavens are too immense, too beautiful and varied, to fit into the mind of any one deity; the murmured creeds of fathers and sons are no match for the astronomer’s gasp.

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

The human condition is such that we can only stomach so much imagination. We need for things to be labeled either fiction or nonfiction. There is no section in between.

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 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.