c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
…My eyes were wet, tears waiting to drop from my eyes and heart started to sob. The words from Jiya pushed me on my back foot…”Source: 'The Unpredictable Heart - You may be a Victim
— MoKSh, The Unpredictable Heart: You May Be a Victim
Life’s unpredictable patterns had a strange way of forming a connected web.
— D.A. Pupa, The Magician
What if happiness was a choice?
— Sunanda J. Chatterjee
He was not a likeable figure but then when you are a part of a family, you cannot wish to see someone wither away even when you dislike him. He is a part of your blood, he and all his idiosyncrasies. There is always a tinge of warmth in the corner of your heart, reminiscent of the good times spent together. Then there are always those moments, when you wonder why everything turned out so different. When you wonder what possibly could hold people together, if not the fact that they come from the same blood? Or are we just not born to be that way? Craving to be something that we cannot be, each with our own false ceilings to hide our true selves?
— Amit   Sharma, False Ceilings
People are complicated. And messy. Seems too convenient that we’d all fit inside some multiple-choice question.
— Riley Cavanaugh
I found myself thinking that perhaps there was something inexorable about the way events unfolded, as if my life--which had begun to seem something not my own but rather something into which I found myself blindly toppling--was indeed something living, that existed without my knowledge but that pulled me along in its strong, insistent undertow.
— Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees
In the library of the observatory in Ondrejov, above Prague, I once found a catalogue of stars that astounded me. It had hundreds of pages with tables of stars that had been observed and confirmed to exist. Towards the end there was a table of stars thought to have been observed but confirmed to not exist. But to my astonishment, at the back of the volume I found a list of stars which had never been observed and did not exist. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the universe is that we could create an infinite catalogue of things, worlds and beings that no one has seen and which do not exist. Each story in the realm of fiction is a small part of that catalogue.
— Peter Nilson, Stjärnvägar: En bok om kosmos
Fiction is an ancient virtual reality technology that specializes in simulating human problems.
— Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
When the world uncovers some dark disguise,Embrace the darkness with averted eyes.
— Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
Forsake the world and cling to the shadows.
— Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
You’re one tough egg to crack. You know that? You’re like a Kinder egg wrapped inside a mystery wrapped inside an enigma.
— Cassia Leo, Anti-Romance
Then maybe you’ll believe me when I say…you’re pretty fucking special, Laney Hill.
— Cassia Leo, Anti-Romance
Well, I didn't really know what to say. So maybe I should say that I have thought about you and I like you, I like seeing you, I care for you and maybe I love you too. And the next time if you tell me you love me, I'll--" She stopped."You'll what?""I'll say I love you too.
— Colm Tóibín
Eventually, you're gonna have to let someone in.
— Cassia Leo, Anti-Romance
Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself.
— Cassia Leo, Anti-Romance
It has been said by many that a true love story has no happy ending simply because the truest of loves never ends. It is immortal. This is the kind of love that lives forever in your heart as a feeling you will always feel, a place you can always return to.
— Michele L. Rivera, Wait For It
As if somehow irony,” she recaps for Maxine, “as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious — weakening its grip on ‘reality.’ So all kinds of make-believe—forget the delusional state the country’s in already—must suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now.”“Yeah, the kids are even getting it at school.” Ms. Cheung, an English teacher who if Kugelblitz were a town would be the neighborhood scold, has announced that there shall be no more fictional reading assignments. Otis is terrified, Ziggy less so. Maxine will walk in on them watching Rugrats or reruns of Rocko’s Modern Life, and they holler by reflex, “Don’t tell Ms. Cheung!”“You notice,” Heidi continues, “how ‘reality’ programming is suddenly all over the cable, like dog shit? Of course, it’s so producers shouldn’t have to pay real actors scale. But wait! There’s more! Somebody needs this nation of starers believing they’re all wised up at last, hardened and hip to the human condition, freed from the fictions that led them so astray, as if paying attention to made-up lives was some form of evil drug abuse that the collapse of the towers cured by scaring everybody straight again.
— Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the alps with the indifferent eye of those who always live there.
— Angela Carter
And maybe her eyes still worked regardless of the shape she took, and she could see everything. And maybe somehow she broke through the atmosphere and was sent somewhere out in space where she couldn’t tell if her eyes were opened or closed.
— J.C. Dorian, You Holy Screaming Symphony
I write pre-apocalyptic fiction. In other words, I’m not interested in a future where everything is blown to hell, I’d rather write something that helps to prevent it from happening.
— James Rozoff
Don't they understand what fiction is?
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
There Peter sat in the new sunlight, plaiting the straw for baskets, until he saw the thing he had been taught most to fear advancing silently along the lea of an outcrop of rock.
— Angela Carter, Saints and Strangers
Sometimes I'll pick up the "heart of the jungle" fossil on my bookshelf, or pull out my old field notebooks from my desk drawer, warped by Amazonian rains and the river's steam, the scent of the jungle still on their pages. I do this to remind myself that fiction does not have a monopoly on the unbelievable.
— Andrés Ruzo, The Boiling River: Adventure and Discovery in the Amazon
I want the real story, the one that won’t make it into the history books or the scientific journals.”“And you think I’m the man to tell it, do you?”“If you were actually there, you are most definitely the person to tell it. You’re absolutely right. There have been plenty of stories. The trouble is, every account is different. Most of them are second or third hand. I don’t know . . . I guess I figured, maybe since you weren’t in such a rush to tell your version, it might be the closest to the truth.”Garvey chuckled heartily. “Well, I can’t argue with that logic, son. Despite my choice of reading materials . . .” he nodded towards the adventure novel he’d set down, a recent translation of the French novel by Jules Verne, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, “I’ve never been one for unnecessary embellishment. You want the God’s honest truth? In this particular case, there’s no need. It’s a hell of a goddamn story.” I was already flipping open a notebook and licking the tip of a sharpened pencil to take notes. I may have been salivating.
— Wynne McLaughlin, The Bone Feud
Are there any leading men in your life?""Several, but they're all fictional.
— Catherine Lowell, The Madwoman Upstairs
I realized that my life of late had consisted of far too much dialogue and not enough exposition. I imagined an angry, bespectacled English teacher slashing his pen through the transcript of my life, wondering how someone could possibly say so much and think so little.
— Catherine Lowell, The Madwoman Upstairs
She was afraid of giving in to that overwhelming, absolute, unconditional love, a love that had shown her the route to heaven, but which had also taught her how much one could suffer, to the point where even the sound of your own tears became deafening.
— Mirella Muffarotto, Soccer Sweetheart
We all move on from history to chance, sorrow to sorrow, hope to hope, joy to joy. Read the book of fiction on the theme. its title is FROM HISTORY TO CHANCE
— Jamaluddin Jamali
Normal life is presentable. In normal life, you clean up the kitchen and keep your balcony tidy and take care of your children. It's hard work--harder than one might think.
— Fredrik Backman, Britt-Marie var här
My father used to say that all protagonists were versions of the author who wrote them—even if it meant the author had to acknowledge a side of himself that he did not know existed. It just required courage.
— Catherine Lowell, The Madwoman Upstairs
My cat has been Petrified.I want to see some punishment!
— Argus Flich, J.K.Rowling
There was something distinctly American about it all, a fundamental difference in perspective and place–in how they saw themselves in the world. And this was what made it so American–not that they felt compassion for mistreated workers three continents away, workers they had never seen or known, whose world they could not begin to understand, not that they felt guilty about their privilege, no,no not that either, but that they felt the need to do something. That they felt they had to power to do something about it. That was what made it so American. That they felt they had the power to do something–they assumed they had that power. They had been born with it–the ability to change the world–and had never questioned its existence, an assumption so massive as to remain unseen. The power and the responsibility to protect the people they imagined as powerless. The poor defenseless people of the Third World. He felts a sudden queasy sadness. What if they knew what a real revolutionary was? How bloody a real revolution. He looked around, suddenly feeling the need to sit, and saw nothing but their faces, their round wet faces staring back at him. What a violence of spirit not to know the world.
— Sunil Yapa
These stories have a dark side. Outsiders and eccentrics are regarded with suspicion, tortured, even killed. The major theme that emerges is of families diminished by conflict; almost a generation of adult males appears to be missing. Their absence is balanced by a number of strong female presences. This also reflects the dominance of women in the Acehnese household.Azhari is a master of suspense. He wastes no words; his narration is sparse. The overall atmosphere of the stories in Nutmeg Woman is tense and anxious. If there is a message, it is a plea for peace and tolerance and an end to bloodshed and oppression.
— Heather Curnow, Nutmeg Woman
She slapped him. Hard. "Tell me!" she screamed, "TELL ME!"."The truth is...I am a liar," Jack said quietly. "Don't be one with me," she sobbed, "it hurts." "The lies or the truth?" he asked.
— Abhik Chatterjee, Genesis
I would like to think of myself as an artist...excluding the part where he bows before an audience. There are no appreciations for killings.
— Abhik Chatterjee, Genesis
Perhaps we would all like to love more richly than we do. Many novels are about love- most are, perhaps-and it gives us pleasure to identify with loving characters. They are free, and we are not. But we may not want to admit this; for to do so might make us feel, consciously, that our on loves are inadequate.
— Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren
Elizabeth, this one last task you will enter in a moment, will determine your fate and who you are. You are eighteen now and with the blood of past generations running through your veins, this will destine who you really are and where you belong.
— Elena Carpenter, Horizon
Paradoxically, however, a story ceases to be like life on its last page. Life goes on, but the story does not. Its characters have no vitality outside the first page and after the last is only good as the next reader's.
— Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren
Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering.
— Scott F. Fitzgerald
There were no mirrors nearby to pose in front of, but I was convinced I was looking pretty awesome.
— Paul Regnier, Space Drifters: The Emerald Enigma
People like you end up dead. One day they are roaming about in their underpants pretending to be Superman and the next day they are killed because they jump off their roof thinking that they can fly!
— Abhik Chatterjee, Genesis
The French poet Mallarmé and, after him, Borges, claimed that “everything in the world exists to end up in a book,” and if that’s true, and that even every man is a book, Federico was undoubtedly created by the pen of Keats or some other tormented Romantic poet; while Matteo was pure passion, like Shakespeare’s Romeo: spontaneous, intense, and impetuously real.
— Mirella Muffarotto, Soccer Sweetheart
It's their failure, my little Anna, not yours. Men who try to understand the world without the help of children are like men who try to bake bread without the help of yeast.
— Gavriel Savit
It's absurd how crazy love can make you......but even more absurd how stupid jealousy can make you!
— Mirella Muffarotto, Soccer Sweetheart
You were the sun, and I was crashing into you
— Rainbow Rowell, Carry On
The hard truths are the ones to hold tight. - Old Bear
— George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
Leyner's fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder's prediction that our TV-culture problems can be resolved by the dismantling of images into discrete chunks we can recombine as we fancy. Leyner's world is a Gilder-esque dystopia. The passivity and schizoid decay still endure for Leyner in his characters' reception of images and waves of data. The ability to combine them only adds a layer of disorientation: when all experience can be deconstructed and reconfigured, there become simply too many choices. And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as "liberating" as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of an assembly's quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience.
— David Foster Wallace
Each Fable is inspired by some true stories which doesn't have an happy ending, unlike the Fable.
— Neetesh Dixit
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.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955
I think the highest purpose of fiction is to show that all people are fundamentally worthy of mercy.
— Tom Bissell
Writing is about truth, whether it be fiction or a school essay. Don't give in and 'fake it till you make it.' Criticize what upsets you.
— Bryant Loney
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.
— Danila Botha, Too Much on the Inside
We're only as good as our word.
— Sunanda J. Chatterjee
There’s something about her, I remember thinking, a little mysterious. I tried to absorb the feeling for as long as I could before I went back to work. I tried not to think about it. Feelings throw everything off.
— Danila Botha, Too Much on the Inside
No; you shall tear yourself away, none shall help you: you shall yourself pluck out your right eye; yourself cut off your right hand: your heart shall be the victim, and you the priest to transfix it.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Fiction is entertaining. Nonfiction is epic.
— A.D. Posey
I’m a little bit of a plot junkie. I like stakes in my books. Sometimes storytelling gets a bit of a bad rap. “Plot’s easy” or “there’s a higher art we are all aspiring to.” Yes, first and foremost we are all aspiring to that art but I also think it has to have a certain propulsiveness, a certain thing that’s keeping me turning the pages. No matter how great the voice is you will have problems in the plot that will enable somebody to put it down. There are too many things competing for everyone’s attention to allow anyone to put that book down. I don’t want the reviewer to put it down because they’ve got 50 galleys stacked up. I don’t want the reader to put it down.
— Lee Boudroux
Writing fiction is fun. Writing non-fiction is life-changing.
— A.D. Posey
Typically, we start out with enthusiasm and then grow unsure--sometimes about everything.
— Eric Maisel Ph.D.
Crushes don't just develop over time,they are built over the foundation of basic trust.
— Sidharth Oberoi, 3 Days of Summer
You said my name and my heart went rogue
— Zandile, Constantly Racing
Whether or not the couple ends up together at the end of a book doesn't determine whether the book has a happy ending or not. As long as the two people end up happy, it doesn't really matter if they end up happy together.
— Colleen Hoover, November 9
He's made me believe I'm worth love of the liquid kind, you know, the kind that seeps to all my damaged parts.
— Zandile, Constantly Racing
If you don't trust a novelist, who are you going to trust?
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón
My one true love remains my self... I dump myself occasionally to keep it interesting
— Cassandra Clare, City of Bones
When you confidently defend fiction, think about reality also
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
While he sweated out a story she bled put a poem. (Dark City Lights)
— S. J. Rozan
Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.
— Michael Dirda
Forgiving himself came easy to him. His, he'd come to realize, was a forgiving nature.
— Lawrence Block, Dark City Lights: New York Short Stories
If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead.
— Christina Baker Kline, Orphan Train
Would not the earth, quickened to an evil purpose by the sympathy of his eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs... Would he not suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot, where, in due course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade, dogwood, henbane, and whatever else of vegetable wickedness the climate could produce, all flourishing with hideous luxuriance?
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
I wanted stories, and I wanted them always, and I wanted the experience that only fiction could give me: I wanted to be inside them.
— Neil Gaiman, Stories: All-New Tales
So many hilarious scenes and seductions!
— Dennis McKay, The Accidental Philanderer
No one asked your opinion O'Brien," the red-haired one snapped again."No one ever asks yours either, that doesn't seem to stop you from giving it," he countered.
— C.E. Dimond, Awakening
Well, here we are."Sometimes a statement of the bloody obvious was the only appropriate way forward. As if to give life ceremonious permission to proceed.
— Michel Faber
Truth is stranger than fiction because lies are much more convincing but the truth always comes out no matter how long it takes.
— Sanjo Jendayi
Blake gave Selena a nudge "Remember what I taught you, itsy-bitsy-babe
— A.E.  Kirk
I miss home. I miss ignorance. I've seen a beauty I can't fathom in the Aquifer, and met a girl who moves my heart.
— Jonathan Friesen, Aquifer
Fiction gives us empathy: It puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
One realizes the immortality of true love only after the lover dies
— Kanza Javed, Ashes, Wine and Dust
Gossip is not adopted by the bored. It is an art of discourse adopted by those who have experienced absolutely nothing thrilling in their lives; they have never really fallen in love or casually spoken to a complete stranger, and they never dreamt of doing anything extraordinary. They are a group of people with dull lives and souls.
— Kanza Javed, Ashes, Wine and Dust
And what is gossip anyway?Just fragments of sad accounts, maneuvered and mutilated year after year for our sinful pleasure.
— Kanza Javed, Ashes, Wine and Dust
I write fiction""What’s fiction?""Fiction is an improvement on life.
— Charles Bukowski, Women
Freedom is a state of mind.
— Sophia Elaine Hanson, Vinyl
The only real purpose of time is to escort humanity in and out of this mortal coil in an orderly fashion.
— Charles Stoll, The Time Thief
I don't know. But it takes a special woman to have such a great love - Zhongwen
— Asma Nadia, Assalamualaikum, Beijing!
Both tears and sweat are salty.  but none of them are faulty. the tears can get you somewhere,  the sweat will make you only wet.
— Ana Claudia Antunes, Pierrot Love: When A Call From The Other Side Takes Its Own Side
People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had, she said quietly, staring into the embers. they don't know what it was like, not being in a camp.
— Nevil Shute, A Town Like Alice
How would I feel about hearing that the plague killed another nearby village a month later? Didn’t I tell you stupidity is the eighth sin?Excerpt From: Cameron Jace. “.
— Cameron Jace, Happy Valentine's Slay, Children of Hamlin, Tooth & Nail & Fairy Tale, Ember in the Wind, Jar of Hearts, Welcome to Sorrow
it was so beautiful', he said. 'the Three Pagodas Pass must be one of the loveliest places in the world. you've got this broad valley with the river running down it, and the jungle forest, and the mountains....we used to sit by the river and watch the sun setting behind the mountains, sometimes, and say what a marvellous place it would be to come to for a holiday. however terrible a prison camp may be, it makes a difference if its beautiful.
— Nevil Shute, A Town Like Alice
Be the best you can be for yourself!
— Susan Marie Murdoch, Iwogs Adventures in Bully Blues
But hereto is replied that the poets give names to men they write of, which argueth a conceit of an actual truth, and so, not being true, proveth a falsehood. And doth the lawyer lie then, when, under the names of John of the Stile, and John of the Nokes, he putteth his case? But that is easily answered: their naming of men is but to make their picture the more lively, and not to build any history. Painting men, they cannot leave men nameless. We see we cannot play at chess but that we must give names to our chess-men; and yet, me thinks, he were a very partial champion of truth that would say we lied for giving a piece of wood the reverend title of a bishop.
— Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry
At the end of the world, music always played on like a bad movie.
— Mav Skye, Wanted: Single Rose
Jade felt the cool rain on her new shapechanger skin.
— Isabelle Hardesty, Legends of the Dragon Vol. 1
We desire to keep the dying and the newly dead close before our eyes so as to give them full need of pity. Our Lord was brought down to be pitied, on the Cross He was too far away.
— Barry Unsworth
It was a fictional story, but like any good fiction, without the need to adjust or conceal the truth, it actually might bethe greatest expression of truth.
— Jacqueline Simon Gunn, Circle of Betrayal
I didn't wait to see her ship go off, because partings are stupid things and best got over quickly
— Nevil Shute
This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy.
— Charles Dickens
And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into thin air and disappear. Pouf!
— Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins
I belong everywhere and nowhere, and I alone can save two worlds.
— Jonathan Friesen, Aquifer
Sometimes a night of over-eating leaves you hungry for something you can't name. An emptiness haunted me. An emptiness I didn't have a name for until I met Jeb. Now, I' m starving.
— Kim Briggs
Fiction writers, magicians, politicians and priests are the only people rewarded for entertaining us with their lies
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, The Great Pearl of Wisdom
Does Carthage even have forests? Did Virgil know for sure or was it just convenient for his story? Virgil was a professional liar. This would not be the only place where he pruned the truth until it was as artificial as an espaliered pear tree against a wall, forced into an expedient shape and bearing the demanded fruit.
— Kij Johnson, At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories
Upon reaching the preserve, everyone knew that the explanation of this incident was dreadfully imminent. With parents already on edge, the looming task of crafting a story out of thin air was one that was not only sickening, but would place a larger wedge between father and son.
— K.N. Smith, The Urban Boys: Discovery of the Five Senses
Everyone has a monster inside
— J.G. Faherty
Narrative secrets are not the same as human mysteries, a lesson that novelists seem fates to forget, again and again; the former quickly confess themselves, and fall silent, while the true mysteries go on speaking.
— James Wood
I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t. . . . I very much love those mysterious volumes, both ancient and modern, that have no definite author but have had and continue to have an intense life of their own. They seem to me a sort of nighttime miracle, like the gifts of the Befana, which I waited for as a child. . . . True miracles are the ones whose makers will never be known. . . . Besides, isn’t it true that promotion is expensive? I will be the least expensive author of the publishing house. I’ll spare you even my presence.
— Elena Ferrante
One reason why fiction is a human necessity is that it satisfies many unconscious as well as conscious needs. It would be important if it only touched the conscious mind, as expository writing does. But fiction is important, too, because it teaches the unconscious.
— Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren
I look up at the ceiling, at all the hardcover fiction. So very few people want it. It is operating as insulation rather than stock. The argument rages on about whether it is better to have books or ebooks, but while everyone gets heated about the choices, the hardcover fiction molders quietly away.
— Deborah Meyler
The Dark Stranger nodded in agreement knowing the time had come for the boys to know more, but it would not be tonight. He grabbed Kinsu’s arm, nodded again, and then ran off into the night. With Chase and Rhee standing behind Kinsu, whose hair was briefly whipped from the air flying from the Dark Stranger’s cape, they understood that they were all alone. They had no clues to a dramatic puzzle which had simply been forced upon them. “Unbelievable,” said Kinsu. And they all walked away feeling somber, drained, and still wondering, who was that girl?
— K.N. Smith, The Urban Boys: Discovery of the Five Senses
And in the absence of even a hint of an exchange, Joaquin spun around and lunged at Ross, grabbed him by the throat, and knocked him down. With dry, brittle leaves and debris suddenly thrust upward, the two were covered in a dark, hazy hell as they pursued a violent struggle for what seemed like an eternity. As he gained his footing, Ross shot back with a punch to Joaquin’s head followed by several body punches. Joaquin stumbled backward and fell giving Ross those precious, few seconds required for escape.
— K.N. Smith, The Urban Boys: Discovery of the Five Senses
She reached behind her back and pulled out slender, black nunchucks and simply invited them to come get her. Their eyes could barely follow the chucks as they circled around her shoulders and torso slapping back and forth, and up and under, while she remained focused and composed with her eastern, tomboy flair.
— K.N. Smith, The Urban Boys: Discovery of the Five Senses
What is it that frightens us about a "novel of causes", and conversely, does fiction have to exist in some suspended, apolitical landscape in order to be literary? Can it not politically and temporally specific and still be in good literary taste? We are leery of literature that smacks of the polemic, instructional, or prescriptive, and I guess rightly so--it's a drag to be lectured to--but what does that imply about our attitudes towards intellectual inquiry? While I enjoy reading kitchen-table novels in which characters are distilled to their emotional essence and their lives stripped of politics and commerce, it simply is not reflective of my experience. I see our lives as being a part of an enormous web of interconnected spheres, where the workings of the larger social, political, and corporate machinery impact something as private and intimate as the descent of an egg through a woman's fallopian tube. This is the resonance I want to conjure in my books.I want to write novels that engage the emotions and the intellect, and that means going head to head with the chaos of evils and issues that threaten to overpower us all. And if they threaten to overpower the characters, then I have to make the characters stronger.
— Ruth Ozeki
Fiction cannot betray the truth. Though it must try"...As said by Ernest Hemingway in "Blast"...The first short story in "Bullet".
— Christopher J. Pumphrey, Bullet
Fiction cannot betray the truth. Though it must try," Ernest Hemingway in "Blast".
— Christopher J. Pumphrey, Bullet
I am the prosecutor. I represent the state. I am here to present to you the evidence of a crime. Together you will weigh this evidence. You will deliberate upon it. You will decide if it proves the defendant's guilt.
— Scott Turow
Can you even have human nature if you don’t have the capacity to feel?” I ask. “Do you mean on some kind of existentialist ‘what are we if not the things we feel’ kind of way?” I don’t know what he means by existentialist. I say as much. He laughs. I entertain the idea of stabbing him for several minutes.
— Ellis Adler
Kukurukuuu,’ our big rooster crowed as usual and it nearly put me off my sleep. My eyes were neither open nor close. In trying to go back to sleep I rolled to both sides on my small wooden bed, covered with a mat. The room was partially dark and warm, sleepless rats busy under my bed in search of food.
— Obehi Peter Ewanfoh
When strange objects shapes the landscape, we get fiction
— Umair Siddiqui
I have inflammation of the imagination.
— Lera Auerbach, Excess of Being
I will not be a victim. I will not think like a victim. I am going to avenge all those little girls. I am going to win.
— Carolyn Lee Adams, Ruthless
That's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.
— Kelly Marcel & Sue Smith
Keep your spirits up, for the demons are scared of salvation.
— Hamsa Priya Selvam, The Gambit
Halcyons are never supportive of dream hoverers and their associates.
— Hamsa Priya Selvam, The Gambit
I don't know how the Wolfman knows all this, but he's not wrong. My warm cheeks turn scalding hot. "Your shame is a good sign. You may break sooner than I thought. The breaking is good. It purifies.
— Carolyn Lee Adams, Ruthless
When he unleashes on her everything falls together. Like a crick in the neck snapped into place, the boy's brain pops and is put right. It is a beautiful undoing, a beautiful becoming. He doesn't stop to think about it when the punches follow her down to the ground. He doesn't stop to notice when she goes still or when the pool of blood under her head pillows out into a great, liquid heart. He doesn't stop until he's pulled off her and he doesn't start to think again until that night, when he's back at home. For hours and hours his brain stays beautifully popped into place.
— Carolyn Lee Adams, Ruthless
Wolfman clears everything off the table except his gun. That he keeps close at hand. There is a sense of ceremony about his actions. My stomach tightens up. We are about to begin.
— Carolyn Lee Adams, Ruthless
When you come to a detour, take it.
— Jack Dancer, Detour Paris
I know you, Ruth Ann Carver. I know you better than you know yourself. You think you do things right. You think you're a paragon of right living. This is a self-told lie, one bolstered by your coddling parents and grandparents.
— Carolyn Lee Adams, Ruthless
..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.
— Salman Rushdie
God don't give out certain.
— Jeffery Deaver, The Coffin Dancer
Through the red haze of my blood I see a strange expression on his face. His eyes have come alive, and I don't like it at all. He's getting off on this now in a way he wasn't before. My first thought is that my honesty is feeding him in a bad, bad way and my second thought is not to question my gut."These are going to be very good days," he says to me.
— Carolyn Lee Adams, Ruthless
I seek to take my audience on an emotional roller-coaster ride, a journey of laughter and tears and every sentiment in between.
— Marc Royston
He looks up and up and up to get to her face. His mama's a tall lady, and he's only seven. He's overwhelmed by red. Red heels, red nails, red lips, red hair, red eyes. So help him, the boy has always thought his mama's copper-colored eyes damn near shined red. He looks into those eyes and knows she's come home funny.
— Carolyn Lee Adams, Ruthless
It was like a commercial for laundry detergent or tampons or a prescription medication with death listed as a possible side effect.
— Carolyn Lee Adams, Ruthless
Dream It, Believe In It, And Achieve It.
— Black Barbie, Schemin' On The Low
The beautiful illusion of fiction is that everything makes sense and that there was a purpose, that there was a point to it all. And that's the best possible lie because it may even be true.
— Neil Gaiman
But what reality was ever made by realists?
— Richard Flanagan
If you want to understand the inner workings of the human mind, read good fiction.
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, The Great Pearl of Wisdom
No one in Cattaraugus had much idea of what an artist’ colony might be. “Art” itself was viewed with suspicion, scorn. There was the sense, as people like my mother conveyed it, of a fraud, a hustle. “Art” was putting something over on someone, the way politicians did. “Art” was a sorry excuse for not being productive, useful. “Art” was vanity, pretension.
— Lauren Kelly, Blood Mask: A Novel of Suspense
Novels are just very, very, very long lies. That is to say, you’ve got to get your story straight!
— Blair Thornburgh
Poverty is everywhere, Zarish. People should have the courage to get out of the vicious circle of it.
— Sara Naveed, Undying Affinity
People like Nicholas are always gonna be around, roots of disaster. But if we fail to rescue them (Zach and Chanel), that is when they actually win.
— Hamsa Priya Selvam
It will be worth it if I am remembered, if not flatteringly, then at least with some small amount of accuracy.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
There is only one misery . . . not to be saints.
— Léon Bloy, The Woman Who Was Poor: A Novel
There are people who believe in the basic goodness of human nature. I believe in the basic evil of human nature. ~ Aarush Kashyap
— Kirtida Gautam, #iAm16iCan
If one were to reply that those who compose these books write them as fictions, and therefore are not obliged to consider the fine points of truth, I should respond that the more truthful the fiction, the better it is, and the more probable and possible, the more pleasing. Fictional tales must engage the minds of those who read them, and by restraining exaggeration and moderating impossibility, they enthrall the spirit and thereby astonish, captivate, delight, and entertain, allowing wonder and joy to move together at the same pace; none of these things can be accomplished by fleeing verisimilitude and mimesis, which together constitute perfection in writing.
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
To annoy or piss off are light offences. I'd say if you abuse the goodness of a novelist or a writer, the truth is, he or she can kill you multiple times or cannibalise you in many antagonist characters.
— Angelica Hopes
Is the writer cruel that makes his characters suffer only to bring them to triumph or tragedy in the end?
— Johnny Rich, The Human Script
What about my patterns of denial, you ask? Well, you will soon read that once I found myself in repose, in Bordirtoun, for an extended period, certain truths about my character began to assert themselves. Truths I had long ignored, and soon, I would find myself deeper, embedded. You will find that I am similarly skilled at this Pong-ian art of denial. After all, I was the one who came halfway around the world, assuming that my father was telling the truth, knowing full well that he was a world-class liar and cheat.
— Leland Cheuk, The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong
When the imagination takes over, the second hand could be the hour hand to a creator of stories.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
Sure, I told him to fuck himself and yes, I paid for it dearly (ruptured spleen). But after my recovery and given the time to reflect, I have a better understanding of who I am penning this for. Not just for the parole board. Not just for wronged Chinese people, not for racist whites, not for my prison therapy group, not for Manny or Jaynuss, not for Momma, not for my once-again estranged father, not even for Lene (though I hope and, in weaker moments, pray she will read this one day), but for others, like myself. Those who lack foresight. Those often overwhelmed by the present. Those ignorant of and indifferent to the past. Those whose worst qualities come to the surface when tested. Those who are fertile ground for dubious moral judgment. Those who feel, in some mysterious but common sense, unmoored.
— Leland Cheuk, The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong
I know everything must be a lie, but I believe it anyway.
— Johnny Rich, The Human Script
Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.
— David Foster Wallace
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.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
What is it with Dictators and Writers, anyway? Since before the infamous Caesar-Ovid war they've had beef. Like the Fantastic Four and Galactus, like the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, like the Teen Titans and Deathstroke, Foreman and Ali, Morrison and Crouch, Sammy and Sergio, they seemed destined to be eternally linked in the Halls of Battle. Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural antagonists, but I think that's too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like.
— Junot Díaz
I shut up. I don't fight, I don't scream. Shame rides alongside my terror. But somewhere deep, deep inside, I hear Mom tell me to trust my gut. My gut tells me I am blind and I am lost, and if I fought for freedom now, it would end in my death. I listen to my gut. Because I want to live.
— Carolyn Lee Adams, Ruthless
A delightfully droll look at how the other half lives from a pet pooch's point of view.
— Kam Williams
If women's pants were suggestive, men's were equally so, and they revealed a great deal more of what was underneath them. . . . And yet no one accused men of being improper or encouraging sin by reminding women of what hung between their legs. She looked at herself in the mirror, irritated suddenly by the double standard. This was how her body was made. The fact that it was well made and encased in a pair of blue jeans didn't mean she was inviting anything.
— Hillary Jordan, Mudbound
The only thing better than a well-read book is a well-read book only read by yourself.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
The imagination is a wild and dangerous forest that is impossible to know the full might of.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
Reading for enjoyment won't die altogether, but this Ereader device has the potential to repel those less imaginative from fiction. And that could have an undesirable domino effect.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
A very important function of intelligence is the ability to premeditate. ~ Aarush Kashyap
— Kirtida Gautam, #iAm16iCan
With a little bit of spirit in her system to help her weave the lies and facts together, Emily told the partial truth.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
If it is impossible let's do it because nothing is impossible, if you set your mind to it.
— Crystal Clary
As sneakily addictive as a game of Pong (which was named, we're told, after the narrator's dad), this zany zip-line of a novel takes the piss out of the Asian-American 'good immigrant' story. Full of charming antiheroes making comically bad choices, the story dazzles us with its absurdity, which makes its eventual wisdom--about lineage, ethnicity, and the meaning of family--all the more wonderfully surprising.
— Michael Lowenthal
Sometimes surviving is all you can do
— Emilee King, Surviving on a Whisper
The only thing more interesting than the truth is fiction dressed up as the truth.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Pessimism
Sing swan, Spring swan then lets fly.Follow the pretty bird across the sky.Call swan, Fall swan, then lets rest.Tucked in the branches of your quiet nest.
— Shannon Messenger, Exile
Fiction has the ability to show us what we don’t know and what doesn’t happen.
— Javier Marías, Los enamoramientos
Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.
— Neil Gaiman
On the blank page all things are possible.
— Marty Rubin
When you don’t know what to believe, when you’re not prepared to play the amateur detective, then you get tired and dismiss the entire business, you let it go, you stop thinking and wash your hands of the truth or of the whole tangled mess—which comes to the same thing. The truth is never clear, it’s always a tangled mess. Even when you get to the bottom of it. But in real life almost no one needs to find the truth or devote himself to investigating anything, that only happens in puerile novels.
— Javier Marías, Los enamoramientos
Is it murder to kill a man if the man never existed? To the man it is.
— Johnny Rich, The Human Script
Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting about in the same sphere, and then it's hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention. Everything becomes a narrative and sounds fictitious even if it's true.
— Javier Marías, Los enamoramientos
Unlikely truths are useful and life is full of them, far more than the very worst of novels, no novel would ever dare give houseroom to the infinite number of chances and coincidences that can occur in a single lifetime, let alone all those that have already occurred and continue to occur. It's quite shameful the way reality imposes no limits on itself.
— Javier Marías, Los enamoramientos
Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going back to something that isn't really clear: that avant-garde stuff is hard to read. I'm not defending it, I'm saying that stuff - this is gonna get very abstract - but there's a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us. There's maybe thirteen things, of which who even knows which ones we can talk about. But one of them has to do with the sense of, the sense of capturing, capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell "Another sensibility like mine exists." Something else feels this way to someone else. So that the reader feels less lonely.
— David Foster Wallace
I'm a writer. I write checks. Mostly fiction.
— Wendy Liebman
Writing is the Art, re-writing the craft.
— O'Brien Browne
Breathe, Emma. Now is not the time to swoon.
— Eva Walker, Hanging by a Moment
There was nothing … and nothing … and then the car bumped up again. There was a muffled pop, the sound of a small pumpkin exploding in a microwave oven.Morris cut the wheel to the left and there was another bump as the Biscayne went back into the parking area. He looked in the mirror and saw that Curtis’s head was gone.
— Stephen King
I steal a glance when no one is looking. Especially at his neck, when he turns to say something to my mother. That slender neck, with its air of determination, brisk and bold…
— Anne Hébert, Kamouraska
I clap my hands together. (Where do I get the strength, the burst of energy?) To chase away the ghosts. Dispel my fears. Arrange the dream. Maintain a kind of balance
— Anne Hébert, Kamouraska
And now the bride begins to move. Little mechanical doll, clinging to her husband’s arm, climbing into the carriage. Her white silk stocking, her elegant shoe.
— Anne Hébert, Kamouraska
That’s what it means to be out of your mind. To let yourself be carried away by a dream. To give it room, let it grow wild and thick, until it overruns you.
— Anne Hébert, Kamouraska
The gray paint peels off the wall in odd and beautiful patterns, each cracked polygon of paint a snowflake of decay.
— John Green, Paper Towns
Life is definitely about taking chances, living every minute with zeal, and then laying back and regretting nothing.
— Quadidra S. Williams, A Melancholy Note SE
But everything evened out eventually, didn’t it – every wave subsided, lapsed back into the ocean, returning, giving them time to put themselves back together again. He was her moon. He balanced out her tides.
— Katie Neipris
Stories are just lies made to look like truth.
— Johnny Rich, The Human Script
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.
— Elin Hilderbrand, The Rumor
Job understood that he was nothing more than God’s invention and so too was his suffering
— Johnny Rich, The Human Script
There's more to life than cause and effect.
— Amy Zhang, Falling into Place
Misunderstandings arise only in undefined relationships
— Anuradha Bhattacharyya, The Road Taken
Don’t you ever cry again, Miss Zarish,” he said in a strict but mild tone. “I would rather die than see tears in your eyes.
— Sara Naveed, Undying Affinity
Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. "Admire me, for I am a metaphor.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
we roar along the rust belts——the great red spot——the polar vortex——the caress of solar flares——ruffle the molten methane and ammonia oceans of me——the storm-riven non-surface of me and mine——that which you call skin——a threadbare term to describe where I stop and others begin——
— Yann Rousselot, Dawn of the Algorithm