Best 4069 quotes in «fiction quotes» category

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

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 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 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.

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

The harder the access, the sweeter the find.

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 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 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 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 last image I registered was Ethan and my hand – linked, bound and unbreakable.

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 marks we leave are too often scars.

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

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

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 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 night came on as swift and soft as a velvet dream. I was scrunched down in the front seat of my car in Neal's driveway trying to become part of the darkness.

Then I realized the vital necessity of art. Human life, yes, you nurse people, you clean house, you market, but then comes the moment of solace and flight. i sit and write and summon other friends, other forms of life, other experiences, and the voyage and the exploration, the delving into character, the vast expanse of life's possibilities and potentialities, contemplation of future travels, of dazzling friendships, all this then makes the chores and the sacrifices beautiful because they are diverted toward some beautiful aim, they become part of the structure of a work of art.

The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. . . . The novel's spirit is the spirity of continuity . . . a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future.

...the nuclear family went critical...

The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn't exist yet. I was making it, standing there, breathing, fixing the air around my body with stillness, trying to capture something—a thought, I guess—as though such a thing were possible, as though I believed in the delusion described in those paintings—that time could be contained, held captive.

Then someone within closed the door, shutting Norah out into the howling dust of the night. The clouds parted briefly to reveal the full moon's cold eye, then closed again. Wind seared over the pavilion's double roof, its voice rising to a shriek. Distantly, among the maze of walls, came the frenzied barking of hundreds of tiny dogs. As she drifted towards wakefulness, Norah could not tell whether it was the wind that she heard just at the end, or whether, within the dark hall, the girl had begun to scream.

Then, the door opens and there he is; silhouetted in the hall light. Long hair, long legs, and a heartbeat in tune with my own.

Then the sun came up and shook the night chill out of the air the way you'd shake a rug.

The novel remains for me one of the few forms...where we can describe, step by step, minute by minute, our not altogether unpleasant struggle to put ourselves into a viable and devout relationship to our beloved and mistaken world.

The ocean swells around us. Sometimes, we are in a bowl of water and sometimes on the top of the lip. The horizon curves. We are sitting on top of the world. In theory, anyone is on the top of their world at every moment, given that the Earth is truly round. But, it’s hard to see that in a subway under New York City and completely obvious out here.

The ocean drummed as loud as pulsating blood, eroding the sand, rushing the beach as if it had a point to prove. And like many things, it receded, was gone, and was replaced anew.

The old are often forgotten. Life moves on without a care for those who wish to remain in the past. We tend to talk too much because it’s rare that we’re listened to.

The old law of an eye for an eye didn’t make them blind to the fact that another man’s terrorist wasn’t their freedom fighter.