Best 4069 quotes in «fiction quotes» category

Normality is much less captivating than the extraordinary.

Normal people have rock collections, shell collections, key ring collections and stamp collections. (The Captain had even known somebody with a letterbox collection.) But a people collection? That had to be the most bizarre one he'd come across. Not to mention the most unethical.

No soy muy buena para hablar con la gente, punto. Y, de todos modos, lo que necesito no es un amigo. No en este momento, cuando prefiero pintar a intentar encajar con los demás. Necesito una mamá que no me mire como si fuera un mueble usado que no combina con el estilo de la casa. Necesito empezar de nuevo. Necesito una vida de verdad.

No tengo la valentía de ir más allá de mi zona de confort. Y mi zona de confort es, obviamente, estar sola e invisible.

Not everyone can be rich,' Peter went on. 'Not everyone can be strong or clever. Not everyone can be beautiful. But we can ALL be brave! If we tell ourselves we can do it; if we say to our hearts, 'don't jump about'; if we carry ourselves like heroes... we can all be brave! We can all look Danger in the face and be glad to meet it, and draw our swords and say, 'Have at you, Danger! You don't scare me!' Courage is just there for the taking; you don't need money to buy it. You don't need to go to school to learn it! Courage is the thing, isn't it? Don't you think so, people? Aren't I right? Courage is the thing! All goes if courage goes!

No, that's where you are wrong. Your mind was full of sadness and darkness. That is a very different thing entirely. On earth it's nearly impossible to know it, but our minds are not at all who we are. Our brains are just an organ. When we died, our minds died too. All of this, all of what is to come, it's your soul. Our souls never die. They are the very root of who we are, not what we are, but who we are.

Nothing felt better to him than the act of waiting for her. As long as he believed it wasn’t in vain, he was able to justify his presence.

Nothing good can come from trying to guess the gods' minds.

Nothing exists except through human consciousness

Nothing in heaven or earth is content to be alone, and so there must always be something more. The universe is governed by a principle no more complicated than this: that a solitary body will forever attract another to itself.

Nothing in the world has a greater power to enslave than fiction. ~ Aarush Kashyap

NOTHING IS GREATER THAN ITS SOURCE

Nothing makes you think you might need years of therapy like saying the word breasts in front of your mother.

Nothing was a natural predator of productive fiction writing like the cell phone. Ditto the laptop. As she had well learned, the laptop could destroy a day.

Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence; many epic tales are pretty much epic crap.

No two readers can or will ever read the same book, because the reader builds the book in collaboration with the author.

Novelists congratulate themselves on their creation of this kind of “character” or that kind of “character,” and readers pretend to talk knowingly about “character,” but all it amounts to is that the writers are enjoying themselves writing lies and the readers are enjoying themselves reading lies. In fact, there is no such thing as character, something fixed and final. The real thing is something that novelists don’t know how to write about. Or, if they tried, the end result would never be a novel. Real people are strangely difficult to make sense out of. Even a god would have his hands full trying.

Novels are just very, very, very long lies. That is to say, you’ve got to get your story straight!

Not tingling as much as a rapid-burning desire and longing. I want him to f**k me. Right here. Right now.

Novelists are basically inviting their readers to play a game of pretend. That's what fiction is: a game of pretend.

Novel is a particular form of narrative./ And narrative is a phenomenon which extends considerably beyond the scope of literature; it is one of the essential constituents of our understanding of reality. From the time we begin to understand language until our death, we are perpetually surrounded by narratives, first of all in our family, then at school, then through our encounters with people and reading. - The Novel as Research. (1968)

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris.

Now I think I understand how this world can overcome a man.

..now, seated hunched over paper in a pool of Anglepoised light, I no longer want to be anything except what who I am. Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each 'I', every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

Nuestra misión consistía en tratar de rescatar a nuestros pacientes del mundo exclusivo, propio, aislado de los demás, en el cual verdaderamente existían, para colocarlos de nuevo en éste, no sé si más o menos ficticio, pero sin duda alguna positivamente peor que los que muchos de ellos poseían, propiedad privada, para desenvolver su existencia mental.

…Obviously, I have always wished I could remember what happened in that wood. The very few people who know about the whole Knocknaree thing invariably suggest, sooner or later, that I should try hypnotic regression, but for some reason I find the idea distasteful. I’m deeply suspicious of anything with a whiff of the New Age about it—not because of the practices themselves, which as far as I can tell from a safe distance may well have a lot to them, but because of the people who get involved who always seem to be the kind who corner you at parties to explain how they discovered that they are survivors and deserve to be happy. I worry that I might come out of hypnosis with that sugar-high glaze of self-satisfied enlightenment, like a seventeen-year-old who’s just discovered Kerouak, and start proselytizing strangers in pubs…

Of all God’s creatures, only man kills with malice. Only man kills out of vengeance.

Often, when I am able to check out a book, I read it a dozen times before returning it, desperate to remain lost in the magic of someone else's story.

Oh. C’mon, pretty girl. I like it when ya scream.” The leader breathed into my ear. I spat as good as I could on his hand. He jumped back glaring. I said, “Funny. You like it when I scream? Yet you cover my mouth!” I laughed then winced.

Oh how precious it is… to allow yourself get shuttered in to million fragments, so that you can then rebuild – a better one!

Oh, how scary and wonderful it is that words can change our lives simply by being next to each other.

Oh I'm sure you're right," Auntie said. "Probably she's just as you say. But she looks to me like a very clever girl, and adaptable; you can see that from the shape of her ears.

Oh you're one of those people are you? The people who ask God for something and when they get it, they tell God to forget about answering that particular prayer because it's just happened. That's one of my pet hates, I'm sorry.

Once I finished reading a good book, it gives me a hard time coping up with reality.

Oh yes, truth is stranger. That's why we wrap it in fiction. Like holding a conch shell to our ear and listening to the sea. Do you hear it?

Once I was King of the Titans. Now I need a MedicAlert bracelet and a subscription to the Safe Return program. Can you put out a Silver Alert on a god? I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.

Once upon a time,’ is code for ‘I’m lying to you.’ We experience stories as lies and truth at the same time. We learn to empathize with real people via made-up people. The most important thing that fiction does is it lets us look out through other eyes, and that teaches us empathy—that behind every pair of eyes is somebody like us.

Once you break someone’s heart, you are forever its master.

Oh r-really? Do t-tell?” I quirked an eyebrow back at him. “Well, usually it’s best to take your shoes and socks off before you step in the stream, better balance on an uneven surface. Also, you avoid that unpleasant squelchy feeling when you wear the shoes againlater.” He paused, smirking. “Also, if I was going to paddle barefoot “I was going to paddle barefoot upstream in Yorkshire, I’d wait until at least May before I tried it. But you go ahead, love. You’re clearly a Spartan lass.

Oh r-really? Do t-tell?” I quirked an eyebrow back at him.
 
“Well, usually it’s best to take your shoes and socks off before you step in the stream, better balance on an uneven surface. Also, you avoid that unpleasant squelchy feeling when you wear the shoes again later.” He paused, smirking. “Also, if
I was going to paddle barefoot upstream in Yorkshire, I’d wait until at least May before I tried it. But you go ahead, love. You’re clearly a Spartan lass.

On a nightstand in a teenager’s room, a glass vase filled with violets leans precariously against a wall. The only thing saving the vase from a thousand-piece death on the hardwood floor is the groove in the nightstand’s surface that catches the bottom of vase, and of course the wall itself. The violets, nearly a week old, droop in the light of a waning gibbous moon. Wrinkled petals are already piling up on the floor between the nightstand and the wall, and a girl only six days sixteen stares at the dying bouquet from her bed.

Once-upon-a-time we buried the memories we didn't want.

One couldn’t be selective when remembering the past. Ignore the turmoil, chaos and pain – and the truly great memories would not shine with such luster.

One doesn't intentionally to alter the truth, just enhance it and make it more memorable.

...one had to expect very little—almost nothing—from life, Aaron knew, one had to be grateful, not always trying to seize the days like some maniac of living, but to give oneself up, be seized by the days, the months and years, be taken up in the froth of sun and moon, some pale and smoothie-ed river-cloud of life, a long, drawn-out, gray sort of enlightenment, so that when it was time to die, one did not scream swear words and knock things down, did not make a scene, but went easily with understanding and tact, and quietly, in a lightly pummeled way, having been consoled–having allowed to be consoled–by the soft, generous, worthlessness of it all, having allowed to be massaged by the daily beating of life, instead of just beaten.

One is almost tempted to say... at last I can almost see a bond. But that will never be, for a bond does not really exist at all: it is a most convenient fiction which, as we have seen, is convenient both to experimental and theoretical chemists.

One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture; A pale blue eye with a film over it.

One of my professors once told me that the last official act of the British monarchy was when Queen Victoria refused to sign a law that made same-sex acts illegal. It would have made me think more highly of her, except the reason she objected was because she didn’t believe women would do anything like that. Parliament rewrote the law so it was specific to men, and she signed it. A tribute to enlightenment, Queen Victoria was not. Neither, as I have observed before, are werewolf packs.

One cannot expect to travel far without faith.