c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
In my head, owning a bookstore meant I could hide in the back reading all day, while other bookworms came and went without a sound, resembling almost a library or, better yet, a convent. People never talked to me or to each other, we were just a secret society of readers, alone but together in silent unity. In reality though, owning a bookstore meant that I never actually had time to read a book myself. And being a newer bookstore, meant that I was broke and couldn’t actually afford staff so I had to do most things myself. Alone. In front of people. With my face showing. And sometimes having to make eye contact. It was awful.
— Kristi Hayes, Bring Me To Life
She looked so beautiful, with every smile of hers, I was falling for her. She had the perfect set of teeth for the perfect face to make up that perfect smile.
— Pritam Banikk, Two digit less love
The word "avant-garde," for example, despite its note of impartiality, generally serves to dismiss-as though by a shrug of the shoulders-any work that risks giving a bad conscience to the literature of mass consumption.
— Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction
Traveling leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.
— Ibn Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Battutah
Character in decay is the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction.
— H L Mencken
Fiction is the most dangerous place in the world
—  that’s where truth lives.
One way to think about your life is as an extended free fall. An epiphany may help you see better as you fall. Rather than a meaningless blur, you will see rocks and trees and lizards. An epiphany is not a parachute.
— David Burr Gerrard, The Epiphany Machine
You already know what the machine will write on your arm. That lie you’ve been telling yourself—you know what it is. That blind spot is not really a blind spot—you’re choosing to look away. Perhaps more to the point, you already know whether you want to see it. You already know whether you’re going to use the machine. So why are you still reading this?
— David Burr Gerrard, The Epiphany Machine
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.
— David Burr Gerrard, The Epiphany Machine
Writing isn't black magic. You just have to come up with an idea...
— Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 5
You ever play that game seven minutes in heaven, baby? Because we're about to play it.
— Kathey Gray, He Loves Me...
I really don't know how he does it. How he can take any situation and seduce its pants off. It's a talent really.
— Kathey Gray, He Loves Me...
I often tell my students that fiction is about desire in one way or another. The older I get, the more I understand that life is generally the pursuit of desires. We want and want and oh how we want. We hunger.
— Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
Your pretense does not fool me, gnome. My eye will be upon you.
— Cassandra Clare, Lord of Shadows
Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it's a manageable size, it's comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000–2016, with A Journal of a Writer's Week
Life is like a game of cards. Everyone throws his card. And, the result depends on all of those cards. Not on a particular card.
— Pramod Verma, Needless without You
There are only two things you’ll ever need to know about me, Farin—and you should know them well. I’m very smart, and I’m very rich.
— Heather  O'Brien, The Ties That Bind
There was something wild beneath the surface that his suit couldn't hide. He had the cocky arrogance of a man who broke the rules with impunity. A man who feared nothing. A very, very dangerous man.
— Sarah Castille, Luca
Fiction is truth, even if it is not a fact. If you believe only in facts and forget stories, your brain will live, but your heart will die.
— Cassandra Clare, Lord of Shadows
A writer must empathize with all of their characters because he is the one that bestowed upon them both joy and misery.
— Terry a O'Neal
If I keep observing the uranium, which means a little more than keeping my eyes on the pot on my desk and involves something akin to surrounding it with a whole system of Geiger counters, I can freeze it in such a way that it stops emitting radiation.Although Turing first suggested the idea as a theoretical construct, it turns out that it is not just mathematical fiction. Experiments in the last decade have demonstrated the real possibility of using observation to inhibit the progress of a quantum system.
— Marcus du Sautoy, The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science
This girl, this girl, and he a man with a business and a secretary and a house with a furnace and bills and a son and a roof with three shingles and a pretty birdpath made of stone that I sometimes see Mrs.Shaw, her tied back with a scarf, cleaning with a dainty skimmer.How does this man, a man like this, like any of them, come to walk at night and stand in a girl’s backyard, and then, smoking and looking up, suddenly feel himself helpless to bher bright magic?
— Megan Abbott, The End of Everything
Don't let the whys have it. Don't let them take advantage of you. They'll crush your heart and steal your peace and mess with your mind and wrap around you so tight you won't be able to breathe. Don't le the whys ruin your life, child. Every time they try to sneak up, push them aside and move forward.
— Amy Matayo, The Whys Have It
He ascended the mountain in darkness, no lamplight, a world black and silver and blue. The moon lay scattered through the woods in blades, glowing palely, the wind rising now and again to moan through the trees. The trail scrawled ever upward, toward the looming darkness of the mountain's peak. Above it all the sea of night, the strange ornamentation of stars.
— Taylor Brown, Gods of Howl Mountain
She died without us by her side, and now, we are left with the scars. In time, they may fade, but for now, they're still hauntingly there reminding us of the loss and pain.- Unlikely Love (coming soon)
— Sophie Palmer
His life seemed like a deck of cards, and in the midst of all those two’s and three’s someone had thrown him an Ace and a King, but they were still different suits. He didn’t know what to discard or what to keep, and he was scared to death to lay them down.
— Tekoa Manning, Walter: The Homeless Man
This is love not business or politics. I love someone. How can I replace her with someone else?
— Pramod Verma, Needless without You
Sure, Bob Dylan had some good songs. But he could have been a doctor.
— R.S. Gompertz, Life's Big Zoo
Enemies can't break your spirit, only friends can.
— Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us.
— Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Outbreaks of unvarnished truths in the backyard of our true self can be very precious and inspiring, even though we might inconsistently be tempted to give in to the exhilarating perfume of fables and fairy tales or to flattering praise and fiction. ("The day the mirror was talking back")
— Erik Pevernagie
Even in the most uneventful of our lives, we are called upon to choose our battles...
— Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence. It is our constant anxiety about that violence, our memory of its past labours and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and as diverse as we continue to coexist – continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another. As long as the centre holds, as long as the yolk doesn’t run, we’ll be fine. In moments of crisis it helps to take the long view.
— Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
...something more than the sum of its parts-
— Victoria Schwab, Our Dark Duet
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
— Faiqa Mansab, THIS House of Clay and Water
To become an effective radiation researcher, you must develop the ability to discern fact from fiction.
— Steven Magee
The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays
What you do today is important . We can never get today back.
— Christine Handy, Walk Beside Me
I am afraid I am going to drift into fiction, truthful but incomplete, for lack of some details which I cannot conjure up today and which might have enlightened us. This morning, the idea of the egg came again to my mind and I thought that I could use it as a crystal to look at Madrid in those days of July and August 1940—for why should it not enclose my own experiences as well as the past and future history of the Universe? The egg is the macrocosm and the microcosm, the dividing line between the Big and the Small which makes it impossible to see the whole. To possess a telescope without its other essential half—the microscope—seems to me a symbol of the darkest incomprehension. The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.
— Leonora Carrington, Down Below
His real name is A.J., but he is known in Heaven as Armor because of how resilient he is in his faith and how persistent he is with his prayers.
— Sunshine Rodgers, Last Night, When I Prayed
The Tanzanian told her that all fiction was therapy, some sort of therapy, no matter what anybody said.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck
Still the Amaltas bloomed, a brilliant, defiant yellow. Each blazing summer it reached up and whispered to the hot brown sky, Fuck You.
— Arundhati Roy
It is not often that I have two options to choose from. It is nice to be compelled towards something, otherwise one drifts through life unimpeded.Bhanggi
— Faiqa Mansab, THIS House of Clay and Water
I had never said those words because there were no words left. My beloved and I were both exiles from language. Our love couldn't be expressed in words. Our love had been woven into the melodies rendered by his flute, and it was subsumed in the atoms of the air we breathed. It had been consecrated in this shrine. It had never been named. It was an unnamed thing that had remained unspoken, unuttered, unsaid. I did not need to name it when he could already hear it.
— Faiqa Mansab, THIS House of Clay and Water
You look like shit.” “Thanks. I look way better than I feel.
— J.T. Lawrence, The Memory of Water
What do you think about America?""Everyone always smiles so big! Well—most people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
An important feature of good characterization in a novel is that the characters are dimensionalized and are not all of one piece. Human beings, as Singer noted, have contradictions.
— Joseph Telushkin, Hillel: If Not Now, When?
The address given to me by Greta was written in such a way that the words looked like numbers, and the numbers looked like the aftermath of a startled octopus meeting a deep-sea diver in a corner café. It was the worst writing I had ever seen.
— Shoeburn Ruffet, Shoeburn and The Ill-Fitting Necklace
She could not have told why she was crying. Such experiences as the foregoing were not uncommon in her married life. They seemed never before to have weighed much against the abundance of her husband’s kindness and a uniform devotion which had come to be tacit and self-understood. An indescriptible oppression which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul’s summer day. It was strange and unfamiliar; it was a mood. She did not sit there inwardly upbraiding her husband, lamenting at Fate, which had directed her footsteps to the path which they had taken. She was just having a good cry all to herself.
— Kate Chopin
Mrs.Pontellier was not a woman given to confidences, a chararacteristic hitherto contrary to her nature. Even as a child she had lived her own small life all within herself. At a very early period she had aprehended instinctively the dual life, that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.
— Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Emotions tend to entwine Earthlings together.
— Ruchira Khanna, Voyagers Into the Unknown
It is amazing how sharing of one’s intimate details can make human beings forget the formality of a relationship and bring them closer together.
— Ruchira Khanna, Voyagers Into the Unknown
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
— Burbuqe Raufi, The Tavern: A Novella
She knew this day was different and worse, much worse than before. This was the day that Bethany began to believe their lies. And not only did she believe them, she silently repeated them, causing more damage to her soul and spirit than anyone else on earth could have ever done to her.
— Katie Hubbard, Darkness Couldn't Hold Her
It had seemed to me an elegant nightmare concoction made by adults for adults, to further the aims and fantasies of adults, and what have children to do with such things?
— Joyce Carol Oates, Expensive People
A few of the gunslingers dance, but only a few. And they were the young ones. The other ones only sat, and it seemed to me they were half embarrassed in all that light, that civilized light.
— Stephen King, The Gunslinger
My thoughts are free to go anywhere,but its suprising how often they head in your direction
— Juvy Ann, If We Fall InLove: Romance
The best love is the one that makes you a better person, without changing you into someone other than yourself
— Juvy Ann, If We Fall InLove: Romance
Everyone says you only fall in love once, but that not true, because every time I see you, I fall in love all over again
— Juvy Ann, String of Fate
He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.
— Joyce Carol Oates, Expensive People
Isn't there some truth in all fiction?" "There's some fiction in all truth too.
— Catherine Lowell, The Madwoman Upstairs
Remember this one thing baby girl, women don’t juggle…we diversify!
— Iesha S. Walker, Seasons
She was disappointed in herself for being the typical girl. She never wants to be that girl. That girl…is an emotional wreck. That girl…was an excuse for men who cheat and lose respect for women. That girl…is weak and needy. Troy was better than That Girl! Troy was stronger than That Girl.
— Iesha S. Walker, Seasons
As Dorothy J. Heydt famously said, the eight deadliest words for any work of fiction are 'I don't care what happens to these people.
— Charlie Jane Anders
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.
— Haruki Murakami, After Dark
Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Whatever binds us, ripples through us all. We might not all be shadow, but we are all human. I remind myself every night. I am a man. I always will be.And I will always, fiercely, defend my loves, to the very end.Let it come.
— Carmen Dominique Taxer, Blood Amaranthine
She reached forward and lifted her uncle up into her arms. He was still too weak to resist, and she comforted him with a stroke of her fingers through his greying hair, softly kissing his lips, tasting the blood with a shiver of anticipation, and moving her kisses to his cheek, the line of his jaw, the crook of his neck where his pulse thundered to push the shadowy blood to its destinations.“Know that, when I do this, I’m doing it, to ease your suffering,” she whispered, lips pressed to his skin, her fangs pressing behind them hungrily.
— Carmen Dominique Taxer, And Blood Divides Us
I know what you’re doing,” he whispered to Raphael, whose movements only became more fervent, and the thought slipped from the boy’s mind so that he became dazed and undone with pleasure, staring up at the ceiling, watching as it blurred and became indistinct, and he felt the rising rush of pleasure, until he cried out in a sharp gasp.And the pleasure went on and on, as it did, unbearably, until either Raphael took pity on him, or he pushed his Genitor away. Whichever it was, the pleasure that was leaking into pain, stopped, and he was lifted and laid down on the stone, cold and hard under his spine, and Raphael was bent over him, kissing up this time, up to his lips, flicking his tongue at them, and whispering: “Don’t question my love for you. Ever again.
— Carmen Dominique Taxer, And Blood Divides Us
We blended and look to what it has brought us.I planted lilies on your grave. The rain is already splattering them with dripping dew.May they last another hundred years, Gerard.A hundred years of lilies.
— Carmen Dominique Taxer, Blood Expanse
Father and the child were no longer speaking, but they sat together in silence. The child was at his feet, and he sat, up in his throne, his eyes on the sky as well.It made her smile. They existed beneath the same stretch of stars. They loved the same night blanket above them.She looked at him, taking the opportunity to relish in his distraction to study him, his midnight hair, his pale body, only barely covered by the cloak, the fur of it distractingly like his hair, his lips just parted enough that his fangs were visible, his deep violet eyes, his long, elegant fingers, stroking the…She swallowed back pain that rose up her throat as she watched Father stroking the boy’s hair. Sitting together like that, the similarities between them were bewitching. She frowned, glancing once, disdainfully at the wavy-haired child with the slanted green eyes, walking to her Father’s throne and bending her knee in a bow.There was a sound like a chuckle, and she looked up at him. He was smiling at her. It warmed the quiet cold in her chest.“Come,” he said in his sonorous voice, and the darkness whispered with it, a thousand voices in varying degrees of age, gender, depth and lifted sweetness, all speaking together. She moved closer to him, sitting where his arm wound around her shoulder, fitting them together like childish toy blocks.
— Carmen Dominique Taxer, Blood Deluge
Ida tried not to sigh.“What do you think of your husband?” he asked.“He was rather short,” Ida said without thinking. When Aubrey didn’t respond, she thought that maybe she ought to elaborate and she said, “And beardy.”That was as much as she could remember of him in the midst of the chaotic events. He was short, bearded, quiet. But mostly short.“He used to be an officer,” Aubrey said.“So I have been told,” Ida tried, again, to keep the cheek from her voice though she was quite certain that she was failing.“In the Varangian army,” Aubrey continued.She resisted the urge to comment on how she didn’t care.
— Carmen Dominique Taxer, Blood Pearl
Dmitri’s nerves calmed as he walked through the hedgerow maze, easily finding his way to the centre, sitting awhile.He had walked the grounds three times, before he finally went into the graveyard, looking for Sveta’s grave. It was easy to find. Easier since he had been to it every night since her passing. When he closed his eyes, he could still see her, strawberry hair blowing in the afternoon autumn wind, face flushed with laughter, eyes sparkling.She’d been a plain girl too. But she’d loved him.
— Carmen Dominique Taxer, Blood Pearl
Skathis might have been an artist, but he'd been a vile one. Strange the dreamer was an artist, too, and he was the antidote to vile.
— Laini Taylor, The Muse of Nightmares
Max: Why do I get the feeling you’ve played god and you don’t know what you’ve created.Dr Hurstville: Hasn’t god done the same with us?
— Jonathan K. Wade
But that's why you're upset now. Fiction is not life.''You don't believe that.''I think I do.''You know as well as I do that the line can't be drawn, that we're infected at every moment by fictions of all kinds, that it's inescapable.''Don't be a sophist,' he said. 'There is a world and it's palpable.''I don't mean that,' I said. 'I mean that it's hard really to see it, that it's all hazy with out dreams and fantasies.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold
You’re not interested in her because by your definition she isn’t real. But your brain doesn’t know the difference. It’s all just chemicals firing and testosterone giving you a hard-on.
— Jonathan K. Wade
I have a hunch the world is darker than I could ever imagine and there is less reason for hope than I am able to see. It makes me grateful there is only so much I can see, and I am left mostly with questions. Grateful, also, that hope is not a reasonable thing. Though I have seen my share of darkness, I am spared perceiving much of it. And here is why I hope beyond a reasonable doubt: I think that as the darkness grows, it makes the dim lights that are left seem brighter. And the darker it gets, the brighter the light appears, until it is so luminous, eventually, even falling shadows are filled with it.
— Brian K. Friesen, At the Waterline
The sultan had enormous eyebrows, fibrous like angora wool. In moments of strife, his eyebrows twitched violently. Like now!His Excellency’s royal blood boiled. Once again another mesmerized American news anchor gushed about Dubai’s vision, hailing the imagination of the al-Maktoum family.“Where is this vision coming from?” probed Katie Couric.“Ignorant Yankee!” Sultan Mo-Mo’s British twang bore traces of Basil Fawlty.The sultan wanted to retch. Dubai’s showboating gave him indigestion, but he continued helping himself to more chips and fiery salsa, downing cold Guinness, smoking excellent hash, humming the theme song of The Wonder Years.
— Deepak Unnikrishnan, Temporary People
But if I die without trying again, I'm a coward. I don't mind having regrets about stuff I've done. It's the regrets about stuff I haven't done that bother me.
— Poppy Z. Brite, Exquisite Corpse
Ah, relationships. If he was lucky, Luke thought, he would never have another one.
— Poppy Z. Brite, Exquisite Corpse
And what was I if not death's ghostwriter?
— Poppy Z. Brite, Exquisite Corpse
Florence, listen to me carefully.... Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don’t ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. Then leave! Disappear. Forget this wretched place
— Sana  Krasikov, The Patriots
He didn't remember ever being less weird than he was right now. In fact, as far as he could tell he had always been more or less exactly as weird as this. if not more so.
— Meg Rosoff, Jonathan Unleashed
Sometimes in life you meet a femme fatale and you can refuse them nothing they treat you like dirt but even the dirt they dish out has a taste you can resist?From the novel 'Adventures of a Dark Duke: The Pin
— Russell C. Brennan, Adventures Of A Dark Duke : The Pin
Who is she, after all? Not a member of the Party. Not even a Russian...What can she do, really, but watch the ginger-haired sacrificial lamb get slaughtered? One wrong move and Florence herself might be on the chopping block herself
— Sana  Krasikov, The Patriots
If we're all aggressive, obedient solders [sic], who's going to write the poems and play the blues and go on anti-war protest marches?
— Ken Follett, The Third Twin
Tell me and I’ll forget
—  show me and I may remember
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
— Sana Krasikov
The ‘fact’ of my actions frequently collide with the ‘fiction’ of my words. And at what point will I live what I say, so I will avoid what I do?
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
There's what's smart and what's right." - Molly in the Night Gardener
— Jonathan Auxier, The Night Gardener
How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from the psychiatrist’s couch or even the lovers’ bed. You see the soul, pinned and wriggling on the wall.
— Martin Amis
It's a tough world to find yourself in, but an even tougher one to be yourself in
— Chris Colfer, Stranger Than Fanfiction
You need to claim the driver's seat," Cash said. "Never take a backseat in your own life! You gotta take that bitch by the steering wheel with all your might - even if the road is bumpy, even if there's blood under your fingernails, even if you loose passengers along the way. Only you can steer your life in the direction that's best for you.
— Chris Colfer, Stranger Than Fanfiction
Human experience is not nest and orderly, ready to be coded into predetermined categories. Real life is messy
— Jennifer Gold, Undiscovered Country
Surely if Alternative Facts are untrue they should be called Ficts?
— Alan Dapre
Why hadn't he chosen a different Amish barn to bed down in last nacht? He hated Bethany seeing him like this. Remembering him like this. A homeless wanderer. A stray.
— Laura V. Hilton, The Amish Wanderer
Some travellers are apt to advance more than is perhaps strictly true; if any of the company entertain a doubt of my veracity, I shall only say to such, I pity their want of faith, and must request they will take leave before I begin the second part of my adventures, which are as strictly founded in fact as those I have already related.
— Rudolph Erich Raspe, The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen
Some sinister secret lat buried in the heart of the graveyard !
— Rajib Mukherjee
Idealistic world views should be our focus.
— Sunday Adelaja
Memory is an artist, an impressionist. She adds colour, sound, smell and emotion to events at her whim. She adds, subtracts and embellishes until the event she started documenting is quite unrecognisable to the others who also experienced it, but at the same time, is more truthful to the owner of the memory. There is no reality. There are only impres- sions of past events, made by a million selves, all interacting with each other, vying for superiority. Reality doesn’t exist, perhaps in the end, that’s my only truth.
— Nigel Jay Cooper, Beat the Rain
One thing an early-on writer has to learn, is to be comfortable with and responsive to critique. When five people in a group tell you this chapter sucks; don’t snap back at them with, “Sure, but it gets better in another 6 or 7 chapters!”Listen. – Thank them. – Consider.They can look from a fresh perspective, and catch things that you might be too close to see.But, you will also learn along the way that not everyone in a group of relative amateurs themselves, is going to catch everything, and there will be a few who seem to never understand much of anything.Some will always want paragraphs chopped down to explosive missiles of passion, while others are more used to long composite paragraphs that I myself find impossible to wade through.You may, once you have hit your full stride and power, feel comfortable telling a few of them, “Look. This isn’t a diner. I don’t take orders: ‘I’m gluten intolerant; he can’t do salt; she’s allergic to peanuts ...’“If what I offer is a salad bar, then No; I am not going to fry you up a cheesesteak!
— Edward Fahey
If you want to be a writer-- stop talking about it! Sit down and write. -Jackie Collins
— Roberta  Wilson
I never said you had to like it. You have to accept it. No regret."-Clare Harding.
— E.M. Benton, Boone
Human beings are born of blood, bound by gravity, eventually to perish... fallible by design... destined.
— Neil Charles, Duality
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.
— Neil Gaiman
There are some wounds unreachable by words, some sins immune to apology.
— Amy Hatvany, It Happens All the Time
The girl I’d been just an hour ago was gone; she’d been obliterated. I had no idea who I was, now.
— Amy Hatvany, It Happens All the Time
...and as she stood on the Ashford platform waiting for the small train to come in, she seemed already separated from the people around her. Tomorrow I shall not be among you anymore; not of you but mysteriously still with you, thought Philippa. As Lady Abbess of Brede had said, "People think we renounce the world. We don't. We renounce its ways but we are still very much in it and it is very much in us.
— Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede
Great characters- They are pivotal for a great plot. THEN a solid plot: Why then? If you do not have great characters it is impossible to create a good plot, nonetheless a solid one. Once you have built great characters for the scenes, there you have it. It’s just like the movies, you cannot have a great film if the characters are frail and their lines are weak as well. I guess great world-building comes along with a good plot. If there is something that will work fine in a novel is how you will develop from the theme. You’ve got to establish a good timeline, and from there it comes a world. You see the technical matters don’t match or matter as much to me. Even a poorly written story, if there is a good plot and great characters on it will make a divine combination There are simply many cases of it over the mainstream and that even reached the big screen.
— Ana Claudia Antunes, How to Make a Book
But life isn't neat the way a story is. And if you try to pretend it is, then you just make yourself unhappy, or screw yourself over.
— Dexter Palmer, Version Control
I felt numb, I felt empty. I was a shell, an abandoned chrysalis, a tomb lying in wait for the dead
— Amy Hatvany, It Happens All the Time
Fiction is the truth inside a lie.
— Stephen King
To embellish reality with makeup, with silk and royal purple, isn’t that what we all should be doing? Beneath the life we live every day the silk and the purple are hiding, waiting for us. A person just has to dare to throw off his everyday clothes, to rip them off and to put on the silk and purple that exist, I know it. But we’re the ones who cover them up. Out of boredom, indifference, fear. Mostly fear. So right from the first moment I met you, my lies were always the truth: in telling them I unveiled the world for you — the hidden world, the true world. You were really the one who lied. You wanted everything to remain untouched, paradise to be paradise, and me angel. But you made a fatal mistake: you never believed me. You never understood why I lied, that through my lies I was giving you a unique gift: the truth. You always tried to control me — out of love, of course. But is there any word more ambiguous than the word “love”?
— Margarita Karapanou
Many politicians are tantalizing storytellers, as they mix facts with fiction, grab our emotion and tell things, they want us to believe. Their factoids are unremittingly reiterated, take a life on their own and in the end become the very truth… until the bubble bursts.("What after bowling alone?" )
— Erik Pevernagie
I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction.
— Virginia Woolf
No, I thought. No way. I love her too much. I would never do that. And then again, those two words, her voice, exploding inside my head: “Tyler, wait!
— Amy Hatvany, It Happens All the Time
Everyone will be tracked, cradle to grave, with no possibility of escape.
— Dave Eggers, The Circle
I want to rewind the clock, take back the night when the world shattered. I want to erase everything that went wrong.
— Amy Hatvany, It Happens All the Time
Happily chatting and counting pocket change, patting each other on the back and whistling foolish songs, we go out on the thousand-legged street and miraculously turn into passersby.
— Sasha Sokolov, A School for Fools
The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality. He will think that the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him, and that his business is to rearrange this essential vision into satisfying patterns, getting himself as little dirty in the process as possible.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
It's never the deviants who are the problem, puss. Don't forget that. It's the people who won't open their minds that are dangerous.
— Lucy Ribchester, The Hourglass Factory
Welcome, old aspirations, glittering creatures of an ardent underneath the holly! We know you, and have not outlived you yet. Welcome, old projects, and old loves, however fleeting, to your nooks among the steadier lights that burn around us
— Charles Dickens
Man alone measures time.Man alone chimes the hour.And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures.A fear of time running out.
— Mich Albom
It is never too late or too soon. It is when it is supposed to be.
— Mich Albom
From the moment of birth, folks suddenly wanted what others said they could not have. Kids craved the most sugary sweets how alcoholics thirsted for one more drink with the most impactful punch.
— Jermaine Watkins, The Heart Train: Episode 1 of the Hartford Series Singles
Fate bring two people togetherand it is love's job t o keep them there.
— Juvy Ann, String of Fate
The kindest thing you can offer an author is a review and a star rating. So appreciated. THE GOLDEN PEACOCK has had a successful 5-star run on Goodreads and on Amazon. Thank you!” Lauren B. Grossman
— Lauren B. Grossman
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
— Salman Rushdie
Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.
— Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction
Best seller material, and she didn’t have to write a single word.
— A.L. Mabry, Tales from Our Write Side
Aut viam inveniam aut faciamIt means, in essence, "I'll find a way or I'll make one." It's how I live my life. Another definition is basically "Never give up," which is the path I've taken when it comes to writing books. I've been writing for almost 30 years and just had my first book, THE LOSSES, come out by a small press. And I'm psyched. Just keep on trucking.
— Cully Perlman, The Losses: A Novel
Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.
— Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow
We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Storylines from fiction always seem inherently improbable to occur in real life, yet when we read them we are happy to suspend our disbelief, which may simply suggest that in our everyday lives we have an irrational craving for certainty and probability.
— Guy Fraser-Sampson, Death in Profile
As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against real life. But I think there are signs that strange things happen, though they do not emerge
— Ivy Compton-Burnett
Waves gently caress the sand as they glide along the shore. Sunlight fills the sky; rocks float along the water and make waves that glisten as they ripple. I’m supposed to be happy but I’m not, it’s raining, and only I can see it.... It’s raining, and only I can see it”Excerpt From: Daniel Sean Campbell. “Josh Harper and The Enemy of Destiny.
— Daniel Sean Campbell, Josh Harper and the Enemy of Destiny
At home you could depend on your parents, but in America you are on your own and should make as many friends as you can . . . You don't know who may hold out a helpful hand in your hour of need.
— Ha Jin
Life is short break the rules.forgive quickly, kiss slowly love truly. Laugh uncontrollably and never regret anything that makes you smile...
— Juvy Ann, String of Fate
All story fiction is both truth that happens and never happens. Fiction is always about humanity, even if no subject is humanitarian or even human.
— Richard Bunning
String of fate brings two people together and it is love's job to keep them there.
— Juvy Ann, String of Fate
Once upon a time I thought I could change stories, make them go the way I wanted, instead of where they actually went.
— April Genevieve Tucholke
My eyes have always been advertisements for an early death.
— David Wojnarowicz, The Waterfront Journals
The writer has no rights at all except those he forges for himself inside his own work. We have become so flooded with sorry fiction based on unearned liberties, or on the notion that fiction must represent the typical, that in the public mind the deeper kinds of realism are less and less understandable.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
I’ve been told that I cannot change shit, so I might as well stop torturing myself. My emotions are ridiculed and branded as childish. I have been told that the world has given up on my people. I have been told, and realise that on many occasions, I myself am viewed as an outcast by some of those suffering. I’ve been confronted and my answer is always the same: I care even in my most fucked-up moments. I care even when gates of shit pour open to drown me; I care because I am a citizen of the world.
— Asaad Almohammad, An Ishmael of Syria
For I’m neither a submitter nor a hating retaliator, I acknowledge the boundaries of my existence; yet, I still care. I care regardless of the way they choose to reduce me to the brand that is the birthmark of the accident of my conception. I care less about what that brand signifies in terms of my character, potential, and intentions. For the harmed I care. For the real victims. It’s the most basic of my mandatory civil duties. Only in caring, am I a citizen of the world.
— Asaad Almohammad, An Ishmael of Syria
For some reason, notwithstanding the alienation and utter rejection, I consider myself a global citizen. They say misery calls for company and I’ve always been a man of funerals. The companion of the misfortunate, until they are not!
— Asaad Almohammad, An Ishmael of Syria
As a citizen of the world, it’s my instinct to keep the fallen and the suffering in my thoughts. The human brain fascinates me; its limitless bounds of empathy. You see, in my mind there is logic to it: do no harm, prevent harm, help, support, care for the harmed, face the harmer. My stupid idealist conscience considers sympathy, not pity, at its worst, the most basic and the least negotiable civil duty. Of course as a citizen of the world, I should strive to do more. That said, I am only a man and so I often do the least.
— Asaad Almohammad, An Ishmael of Syria
Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get. The treacled pop songs, the dresses described in the catalogs with words like 'sunset' and 'Paris'. Then the dreams are taken away with such violent force; the hand wrenching the buttons of the jeans, nobody looking at the man shouting at his girlfriend on the bus.
— Emma Cline, The Girls
Each time I discovered a potential link between one character’s story and another’s, several more connections would reveal themselves, like a beautiful, complex web spinning itself.
— Richard Scarsbrook, Rockets Versus Gravity
It's hard. Being 15, 16, 17. You get so angry. You want to do something with that anger. I guess try to find some other way to let it out. Don't kill people. Don't kill yourself. Let yourself grow up a little. Then you might start to think differently about things. You might get new opportunities to do something with your life that you never thought possible as a teenager." -- Thomas Harvey from the upcoming novel, "Nikki White: Polar Extremes" (Nikki, #3)
— Jack Chaucer, Nikki White: Polar Extremes
I had try to tell the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it
—  as I cannot tell it now. But if you have had it you know.
Marian was suddenly overcome by an appalling crippling panic. She was very frightened at the idea of arriving. But it was more than that. She feared the rocks and the cliffs and the grotesque dolmen and the ancient secret things. Her two companions seemed no longer reassuring but dreadfully alien and even sinister. She felt, for the first time in her life, completely isolated and in danger. She became in an instant almost faint with terror.She said, as a cry for help, ‘I’m feeling terribly nervous’.‘I know you are,’ said Scottow.(…)Marian was appalled at the sudden quietness. But the insane panic had left her. She was frightened now in an ordinary way, sick in her stomach, shy, tongue-tied, horribly aware of the onset of a new world.
— Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn
I thought you'd be interested in these things as a government man. Ain't you mixed up in the prices of things we eat or something? Ain't that it? Making them more costly or something. Making the grits cost more and the grunts less?
— Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not
Words, to me, are the same as an instrument is to a musician. I never know where this typewriter is going to take me until I begin. I never know what I'm feeling until I read over what I have written.
— Tessa Emily Hall, Unwritten Melody
Soon we could barely recognize them. They were taller than we were, and heavier. They were loud beyond belief. I feel like a duck that's hatched goose's eggs.
— Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic
Do you want the truth or fiction?
— Jon Chopan, Pulled from the River
She paused in the doorway, tipping her head to consider Brittany, who only glared. "You're right. I think most girls don't look like the tooth fairy dresses them every day.
— Wendy  Knight
As a citizen of the world, it’s my instinct to keep the fallen and the suffering in my thoughts... You see, in my mind there is logic to it: do no harm, prevent harm, help, support, care for the harmed, face the harmer. My stupid idealist conscience considers sympathy, not pity, at its worst, the most basic and the least negotiable civil duty. Of course as a citizen of the world, I should strive to do more. That said, I am only a man and so I often do the least.
— Asaad Almohammad
But you became self-aware. Somehow, you began to hear the Narrator’s voice. You realised that you were a character in a story. You tried to fight. These actions have disrupted the flow of fiction.
— Dylan Randall Wong En Lai, this is how you walk on the moon: an anthology of anti-realist fiction
Cheers went up around the decks as the Dolphins oars began to move as one in and out shifting and cutting away at the sea beneath, SICANIA RISING
— Daniel P Buckley
Hagnon fixes a value to everything. It occurs to Alexander that the man would probably sell his mother for an obol and consider it a deal.
— Eleanor Herman, Legacy of Kings
Next she turned the gun upward and thrust the muzzle into her mouth. Now it was aimed directly at her cerebrum-- the gray labyrinth where consciousness resided.
— Haruki Murakami
Computer Coding is a life skill for this generation.
— Tamara Zentic MS
We had been with the men, we had let them do what they wanted. But they would never know the parts of ourselves that we hid from them - they would never sense the lack or even know there was something more they should be looking for.
— Emma Cline
Boney freckled knees pressed into bits of bark and stone, refusing to feel any more pain.Her faded t-shirt hugged her protruding ribs as she held on, hunched in silence.A lone tear followed the lumpy tracks down her cheek, jumped from her quivering jaw onto a thirsty browned leaf with a thunderous plop.Then the screen door squeaked open and she took flight.Crispy twigs snapped beneath her bare feet as she ran deeper and deeper into the woods behind the house. She heard him rumbling and calling her name, his voice fueling her tired muscles to go faster, to survive.He knew her path by now. He was ready for the hunt.The clanging unbuckled belt boomed in her ears as he gained on her.The woods were thin this time of year, not much to hide behind. If she couldn’t outrun him, up she would go.Young trees teased her in this direction, so she moved east towards the evergreens.Hunger and hurt left her no choice, she had to stop running soon.She grabbed the first tree with a branch low enough to reach, and up she went.The pine trees were taller here, older, but the branches were too far apart for her to reach. She chose the wrong tree.His footsteps pounded close by.She stood as tall as her little legs could, her bloodied fingers reaching, stretching, to no avail. A cry of defeat slipped from her lips, a knowing laugh barked from his.She would pay for this dearly. She didn’t know whether the price was more than she could bear. Her eyes closed, her next breath came out as Please, and an inky hand reached down from the lush needles above, wound its many fingers around hers, and pulled her up.Another hand, then another, grabbing her arms, her legs, firmly but gently, pulling her up, up, up. The rush of green pine needles and black limbs blurred together, then a flash of cobalt blue fluttered by, heading down.She looked beyond her dangling bare feet to see a flock of peculiar birds settle on the branches below her, their glossy feathers flickered at once and changed to the same greens and grays of the tree they perched upon, camouflaging her ascension.Her father’s footsteps below came to a stomping end, and she knew he was listening for her. Tracking her, trapping her, like he did the other beasts of the forest.He called her name once, twice. The third time’s tone not quite as friendly.The familiar slide–click sound of him readying his gun made her flinch before he had his chance to shoot at the sky. A warning. He wasn’t done with her.His feet crunched in circles around the tree, eventually heading back home.Finally, she exhaled and looked up. Dozens of golden-eyed creatures surrounded her from above. Covered in indigo pelts, with long limbs tipped with mint-colored claws, they seemed to move as one, like a heartbeat. As if they shared a pulse, a train of thought, a common sense.“Thank you,” she whispered, and the beasts moved in a wave to carefully place her on a thick branch.
— Kim Bongiorno, Part of My World: Short Stories
You're supposed to make your child feel like you want them. No matter what. Even if you're tired, or you're stressed, or you have a fucking photo shoot, or you move across the world, or you haven't gotten a full night's sleep. You do whatever you can to make them feel like the only thing you want in the world is to be by their side, even if you can't.
— Nic Joseph, Boy, 9, Missing
The shadowy edge between normal and paranormal is more than ILLUSORY...
— Sahara Sanders, A Dream of Two Moons  Novel
The fiction writer is an observer, first, last, and always, but he cannot be an adequate observer unless he is free from uncertainty about what he sees. Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute. The Catholic fiction writer is entirely free to observe. He feels no call to take on the duties of God or to create a new universe. He feels perfectly free to look at the one we already have and to show exactly what he sees.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose