c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
If something unusual is what you really see and really feel, and if that’s what does happen to you in your real life, how is THAT called FICTION? One simple reason... that it’s the only way the society would agree to call it “normal,” based on the current level of development of their mentality.
— Sahara Sanders, INDIGO DIARIES: A Series of Novels
Life has to end," she said. "Love doesn't.
— Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
You may ask, why not simply call this literature Christian? Unfortunately, the word Christian is no longer reliable. It has come to mean anyone with a golden heart. And a golden heart would be a positive interference in the writing of fiction.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Empires come and go. Chanterelles are timeless
— Sylvain de Ville-Amois, The Chanterelle Chronicles: A Myth
It is generally supposed, and not least by Catholics, that the Catholic who writes fiction is out to use fiction to prove the truth of the Faith, or at the least, to prove the existence of the supernatural. He may be. No one certainly can be sure of his low motives except as they suggest themselves in his finished work, but when the finished work suggests that pertinent actions have been fraudulently manipulated or overlooked or smothered, whatever purposes the writer started out with have already been defeated. What the fiction writer will discover, if he discovers anything at all, is that he himself cannot move or mold reality in the interests of an abstract truth. The writer learns, perhaps more quickly than the reader, to be humble in the face of what-is. What-is is all he has to do with; the concrete is his medium; and he will realize eventually that fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying within them.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality depend by contact with mystery. Fiction should be both canny and uncanny. In a good deal of popular criticism, there is the notion operating that all fiction has to be about the Average Man, and has to depict average ordinary everyday life, that every fiction writer must produce what used to be called "a slice of life." But if life, in that sense, satisfied us, there would be no sense in producing literature at all.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
I'll call any length of fiction a story, whether it be a novel or a shorter piece, and I'll call anything a story in which specific characters and events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative. I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing. When they realize that they aren't writing stories, they decide that the remedy for this is to learn something that they refer to as "the technique of the short story" or "the technique of the novel." Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
When we front a fiction, we are destined for loneliness.
— Craig Groeschel, Dare to Drop the Pose: Ten Things Christians Think but Are Afraid to Say
After eight days in the sun of the Virgin Islands her skin was brown enough and her hair was returning to its natural colour. She walked miles up and down the beaches and ate nothing except fish and fruit. She slept a lot the first few days.She looked at her wrist and then remembered that her watch was in a bag somewhere. She didn't need it here. She woke with the sun and went to bed after dark. But now she was waiting, so she had looked at her wrist.It was almost dark when the taxi stopped at the end of the small road. He got out, paid the driver and looked at the lights as the car disappeared back up the road. He had one bag. He could see a light from the house between the trees at the edge of the beach, and he walked towards it. He didn't know what to expect. He knew how he felt about her, but did she feel the same?She was waiting at the back of the house, looking out to sea, with a drink in her hand. She smiled at him, put down her drink and let him come to her.They kissed for a long minute. 'You're late,' she said.
— John Grisham, The Racketeer
Fiction operates through the senses, and I think one reason that people find it so difficult to write stories is that they forget how much time and patience is required to convince through the senses. No reader who doesn't actually experience, who isn't made to feel, the story is going to believe anything the fiction writer merely tells him. The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Even if she’d [Ossie] gotten away from him [her ghost fiancé] the prognostications were grim—alligators with unusual pigmentation can’t camouflage themselves in the dust-and-olive palette of the swamp. Their skin is spotlit for predators. That’s why you don’t see albino Seths [Ava’s pet name for alligators] in the wild. Once an alligator reaches a size of four feet its only real predator is man.
— Karen Russell, Swamplandia!
The second main reason [that Christopher finds people confusing] is that people often talk using metaphors. These are examples of metaphorsI laughed my socks off.He was the apple of her eye.They had a skeleton in the cupboard.We had a real pig of a day.The dog was stone dead.The word metaphor means carrying something form one place to another, and it comes from the Greek words . . . .I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people do not have skeletons in the cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me.
— Mark Haddondon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
From 1929 to 1933, [age 25-29] I lived almost continuously in Berlin, with only occasional visits to other parts of Germany and to England. Already, during that time, I had made up my mind that I would one day write about the people I’d met and the experiences I was having. So I kept a detailed diary, which in due course provided raw material for all my Berlin stories. [from preface]
— Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories: The Last of Mr Norris/Goodbye to Berlin
It may be that the Chronicles of Narnia may outlive The Allegory of Love, and Perelandra outlive them both. Few works of learning and criticism survive a hundred years; what it was learned to know in 1950 will be expected of scholarship-candidates in 2000; new things will be discovered, old notions disproved, other critical values asserted; but a piece of genuine imagination in fiction may have a long life.
— Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis
The old law of an eye for an eye didn’t make them blind to the fact that another man’s terrorist wasn’t their freedom fighter.
— Asaad Almohammad, An Ishmael of Syria
I am not an atheist preacher. I am not an absolutist or chauvinist whose ways are immune to evolution. My core philosophy is that I might be wrong.
— Asaad Almohammad, An Ishmael of Syria
In light of my distanced telescopic exposure to the mayhem, I refused to plagiarise others’ personal tragedies as my own. There is an authorship in misery that costs more than empathy. Often I’d found myself dumbstruck in failed attempts to simulate that particular unfamiliar dolour. After all, no one takes pleasure in being possessed by a wailing father collecting the decapitated head of his innocent six year old. Even on the hinge of a willing attempt at full empathy with those cursed with such catastrophes, one had to have a superhuman emotional powers. I could not, in any way, claim the ability to relate to those who have been forced to swallow the never-ending bitter and poisonous pills of our inherited misfortune. Yet that excruciating pain in my chest seemed to elicit a state of agony in me, even from far behind the telescope. It could have been my tribal gene amplified by the ripple effect of the falling, moving in me what was left of my humanity.
— Asaad Almohammad, An Ishmael of Syria
In the mantra of shared hatred and placing the blame on Israel, our cowardice to face the barbarity of our heads of states was replaced with a divine purpose. Contemplating the manifestation of the eradication of hatred I often concluded, the entirety of the Middle East’s theocracies and dictatorships would be replaced by total anarchy. We would be left with nothing, as our brotherhood of hatred was the only bond known to us. Enculturated in the malarkey of that demagoguery, forces beyond our control and comprehension seem to deceive us into a less harmful and satisfactory logic as opposed to placing some blame on ourselves and thus, having to act to reverse that state of affairs.
— Asaad Almohammad, An Ishmael of Syria
I have to stress that my duties towards victims of all sorts, be it helping, taking their side, or caring, ends the moment their status becomes a bargaining chip. The moment the victim becomes a righteous sufferer. For in my short time on this planet, history and on-going affairs are full of those competing in victimhood.
— Asaad Almohammad, An Ishmael of Syria
There's one thing I want you to do for me.""Anything." He pleaded."When you're all alone, sitting in the silence behind bars, separated from your freedom. Ask yourself. Was it worth it?" She closed her eyes and pulled the trigger.
— M.J. Umland, Willow Lake:
Authors are supernatural beings. They exist in the world, also in worlds they create, and in the worlds of other authors they read.
— Lani Brown
Perhaps all love stories no matter how varied are essentially the same.
— Roy L. Pickering Jr., Matters of Convenience
And although he recognized that tenderness was not the same as passion, and certainly not equivalent to love, for now it seemed to him a suitable substitute.
— Roy L. Pickering Jr., Matters of Convenience
Was she happy? She thought – yes, reasonably so. Then again, what was happiness but the vast terrain between ecstasy and agony? Was this too small an ambition?
— Roy L. Pickering Jr., Matters of Convenience
If erotic writing is the objectification of sex, then reading is its subjectification.
— Mark John Isola
Sanctum, a holy or sacred place. What could be more sacred than possessing the power of your own true thoughts? Sanctum. It is both lock and key.
— Madeleine Roux, Sanctum
Once you break someone’s heart, you are forever its master.
— Roy L. Pickering Jr., Matters of Convenience
Real is overratedNo way in my life is that the gistI'd be everything I am notIf I were a fictionist
— A.A. Patawaran
Nothing felt better to him than the act of waiting for her. As long as he believed it wasn’t in vain, he was able to justify his presence.
— Roy L. Pickering Jr., Matters of Convenience
It's either true or it's not.
— Marie Bannon, Rock 'n Roll Weekend: A Novel by Marie Bannon
On occasion he would think back to the fiercest passion it had been his pleasure to experience and reflect on what might have been. He would look upon the woman who occupied the opposite half of his bed and feel his life had not quite lived up to the promise of another day. These moments would be mercifully brief, or so he hoped.
— Roy L. Pickering Jr., Matters of Convenience
if the count of monte cristo could escape the chateau d'if, william smithback could escape from river oaks
— Douglas Preston, Dance of Death
It was almost as if she had willed him into existence, into standing before her at the precise moment she was willing to accommodate him, arriving not a minute too early or too late.
— Roy L. Pickering Jr., Matters of Convenience
Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives
— Roy L. Pickering Jr., Matters of Convenience
His fierce appreciation of female beauty, the unrelenting desire he felt for their company, the pleasure he both derived and sought to give, had led him in and out of quite a few bedroom doors.
— Roy L. Pickering Jr., Matters of Convenience
...forever meant different things to people at different times. They could imagine what infinity looked and felt like as much as they wanted, but could never truly grasp its meaning nor bear its full weight.
— Roy L. Pickering Jr., Matters of Convenience
Be determined. Be persistent. Be consistent," the muse said. "Then he looked at me and winked. "Never give up, dumb-ass.
— Lani Brown
What an interesting contrast between us, even just in the consideration of one woman. Your complete disregard for her will ironically be your destruction, while my regard for her will be my triumph over you.
— T.K. Naliaka, Iron Mixed with Sand Salt without Memory
You're the one taking all the romance out of this," he said. "It's supposed to go, 'that was so brave, how you stood up for your sister like that!' 'Oh, that, what, no, it's what any dragon would do.' 'No, no - you're special. I can tell.' 'Not as special as you. There's a magic about you I've never found in any other dragon!' 'Why - why do I feel as though I've known you forever?' 'Because you have...and you will.' Fireworks! True love and happiness for the rest of our lives!
— Tui T. Sutherland, Darkstalker
Smile in front of the queen?" she said with a feigned gasp of disapproval. 'Surely that's not allowed!
— Tui T. Sutherland
Early in 1967 Highsmith's agent told her why her books did not sell in paperback in America. It was, said Patricia Schartle Myrer, because they were 'too subtle', combined with the fact that none of her characters were likeable. 'Perhaps it is because I don't like anyone,' Highsmith replied. 'My last books may be about animals'.
— Andrew Wilson, Patricia Highsmith, Ζωή στο σκοτάδι
The sun rolls along up Fourteenth Street and the ghost of a habit turns Cat's face into the light. She shields her eyes and looks east, half expecting to see her father, a sun-blown shadow in the diorama box of his newsstand.
— Cari Luna, The Revolution of Every Day
Even the fiercest of anarchists lose their teeth to age.
— Cari Luna, The Revolution of Every Day
You've turned on us, New York. We who see your jagged-tooth skyline rise up and want to weep because we are so full of you. We who know that the tumbledown tenements are beautiful, that the cracked sidewalks are beautiful, that the iron and cobblestones, the soot and the stink are beautiful, that the tired old shoemakers are beautiful. That the bodega cats, the gutter rats, the endless clouds of pigeons are beautiful . . . We mourn for you, New York, because you are forgetting us, your brash and ragged children.
— Cari Luna, The Revolution of Every Day
Violet smiled up at Nikolai. "I'm so very glad you came to Riversleigh."Nikolai looked serious as he thought for a moment. "You know what, myshka? I'm very glad too. The old world and the old ways are dying. I think the new world and the new ways are filled with endless possibilities.
— Belinda Murrell, The Lost Sapphire
If you are writing fiction, think like a god. Release all the power of your imagination; create worlds and destroy them at your will, create as many miracles as your story needs
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity
He'd never known he had so much fight in him. Never known he could be capable of so much... He was going to change the world.
— Ethel Rohan, The Weight of Him
Let your writing liberate you. Write with passion to allow your feelings to breathe and enjoy the journey across blank pages.
— Amitav Chowdhury
While Kalila didn't quite know what she wanted, she knew what she didn't want. She didn't want to live a charade. She didn't want a marriage of convenience where you were together but alone.
— Christian F. Burton, Energy Dependence Day
No one can stop death, Omari. It is normal and certain. And nothing should get in the way of a person’s true destiny.
— Stephen Whitfield, Omari And The People
What you must do,” she continued, “you will. Your mission will be as clear to you and as demanding as your heartbeat. Everything else is just a waste of your time.
— Stephen Whitfield, Omari And The People
If Audrey sensed what he was contemplating, her silence did not let on. He turned from the window and found her looking at him with a flawless poker face. It may have been attentiveness and curiosity to hear what he would say next, or perhaps she was expecting from him what women throughout the ages, often against their better judgment, had expected of men.
— Roy L. Pickering Jr., Matters of Convenience
...the locale did not make him think of her, nor did most things. He felt no negativity about the time they had spent together, but simply did not dwell on it much. She had been a seat filler, memorable as the smiling face of a beautiful girl in the window of a passing train, inspiring a fleeting moment of joy and promise, immediately forgotten with the opening of that day’s newspaper.
— Roy L. Pickering Jr., Matters of Convenience
Life was a swirl of mysteries, each one waiting to be plucked up and explored, but not necessarily solved. As the weight of responsibility bore down on a person, it could feel like a long list of chores leading up to the final one - figuring out how to die with dignity. But Quincy’s interpretation of his surroundings seemed a truer representation of life’s meaning, or rather, the lack of meaning other than to dazzle and delight and befuddle from cradle to grave.
— Roy L. Pickering Jr.
Was happiness (which was perhaps achieved not by getting what you wanted, but rather, by obtaining what you didn’t know you wished for until it was in hand) a hologram that would continually change appearance with the slightest shift of perspective? Or maybe happiness by definition was a temporary state of being recognizable only in hindsight. It was impossible to catch what always managed to be overrun and end up in the rear view mirror.
— Roy L. Pickering Jr., Matters of Convenience
fiction:the oceani diveheadfirstintowhen icanno longerbreathe in re
— Amanda Lovelace, The Princess Saves Herself in this One
Because zombies can’t go out into the sun, most of them tend to be afraid of anything that can go into the sun and live to tell the tale.
— M.C. Steve
We made the choice, right there in our local coffee shop, that we were going to do things differently. We were going to put the story first, no matter where that led us. We’d open ourselves up to all genres, all forms. We’d publish works that stayed with us in an intangible way, long after that last page is turned.
— Dani Hedlund
The revised edition of my book "A Woman Of Courage" is now available .
— Eshelle Butler, A Woman Of Courage
There were things hiding inside of her I wasn’t equipped to see and this collapse ripped her open to me. I searched her cavities for symbols that would betray her true nature, but found nothing I could read, just a vast absence containing her poverty of morals. I should’ve known, the need for my presence in her life was never love, only a sluice of goodness she would let flood the gulley of her body when she needed to appear human.
— K.I. Hope, We Are Making the World a Better Place
How talented was death. How many expressions and manipulations of hand, face, body, no two alike. They stood like the naked pipes of a vast derelict calliope, their mouths cut into frantic vents. And now the great hand of mania descended upon one hundred-throated, unending scream.
— Ray Bradbury
...fiction is as useful as truth, for giving us matter, upon which to exercise the judgment of value.
— G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica
This is new territory; a bridge between the conservative and conventional lit mag tradition and those colourful speculation-driven pamphlets that you find in stacks by the coffee-shop door, full of zombies and vampires and crashing space ships. This is a serious journal with a wide aesthetic.
— The Review Review
I was seven," she answered. "In my room, under the bed, I heard something like fingernails dragging across the floor. I got up the courage, hung my head over the side, and looked under.""You're never supposed to do that," Mila gasped. "Seriously, don't you pay attention to the horror movies?
— Lani Brown, Witchy Girls: The Rise to Power
I knew when I got into self-publishing I would have to compete with other authors' words. I did not, however, know that I was going to have to compete with so many sculpted abs!
— Matthew Culberson, After Life
I have been loved said Edward to the stars.
— Kate DiCamillo, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
There will be no holding off, there will be no remorse and there will be no hesitation. They will die and they will die a horrible death. This is my pledge and vow, so bank on it and don’t try to stop me.
— Mark A. McCormick, The Remote Viewer
To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you. It can help you not to be dead man in life.
— D.H. Lawrence
I always win.
— Brittany Noel Bostic, The Fight
Real life was curious enough without the embellishments of fiction.
— John Connolly, The Lovers
I wake up and look at that bridge, try to count the red taillights I see heading east every morning, a kind of rosary as I pray for another crisis to dwarf the one defining us right now.
— K.I. Hope, We Are Making the World a Better Place
The sea is rushing in now as unconsciousness does.I can see a chord, hear gospel songs as we hoist the sails.The sails are a soft white bird. We are airborne. We are primitive.
— Suzy  Davies, Johari's Window
It was important to tell people. To let people know that this can happen. Your child's body can stop. Stop breathing, stop beating.
— Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone
The quiet brings to mind the multitude of men and women living out their days in solitude—each convinced that their fears and wants are unique to themselves—and she longs to press herself into their fold and be counted among those whose lives are meshed with the turning of the world.
— John Pipkin, The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
God isn't going to scribble across the sky. "The shark is gone.
— Peter Benchley, Jaws
The first time Kiya met Hapi was over a year ago. On that day, she was at the temple - not to sell pigeons and bread as usual, but to pray and offer sacrifices on the altar of Horus - the God of protection.
— Mirette Baghat, A Coffin of Roses
He knelt down beside her and slowly rubbed a soft, muculent mix on her bare skin like a sculptor at work. It carried the pleasurable smell of wet earth. With his fingertips, he gently stroked every part of her body; and with every stroke, she groaned softly. She felt the pain that filled every bone in her body, yet she also felt the immense sensation of pleasure and comfort that was so foreign to her
— Mirette Baghat
The small Chinese man sank onto the plush leather sofa. He sank so low on the large brown sofa, it looked like it would swallow him whole. He sat, clutching his briefcase close to his chest, his alert eyes scanning the spacious room. Opposite him, across a glass table sat a large African Minister in a freshly pressed Italian suit.
— Marko Phiri, Fool's Gold
Yet Nathan appreciated being alone as he sipped his cold glass of beer. It gave him time to think. In the next thirty minutes or so, the flight he was waiting for would land and his day would begin. It was autumn in the capital, and the clear skies created an illusion of a city that was at peace with itself.
— Marko Phiri, Fool's Gold
As Zhao ducked, he sneaked a blow aimed at Homwe’s stomach. Homwe groaned in surprise and confusion – shocked at his opponent’s speed and strength. He quickly drew a handgun from under his jacket and hit Xi Zhao on the head, drawing blood from his skull.
— Marko Phiri, Fool's Gold
I'll tell you a story about Johnny Magory!
— Emma-Jane Leeson, Johnny Magory in the Magical Wild
Here the sky is wrapped in silk. The breathings of so many men and animals, and the smoke of your coal, and the fog, oh, it is too much. The Paris sky is perfect. A man must see clearly, to see something new.
— John Pipkin, The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
Sometimes he counts himself to sleep by imagining the miles between stars like the succession of footsteps cleaving him from his home, as if mastering the distance in thought might blunt the separation. But if a man cannot return to the place of his birth, then what is there to stay his restless feet? What center will hold him from wandering endlessly? It should not be so difficult, he thinks, to know one’s place in the order of things.
— John Pipkin, The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
Time lost to pointless delay can never be regained. It is the most reprehensible kind of theft. Why was it that men did not grasp this simple fact? Money comes and goes and comes again, and knowledge can be acquired and forgotten and rediscovered, but time once lost is lost for good, each passing second irretrievable.
— John Pipkin, The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
As insane as his request sounded to her, the fact that he already saw her nakedness the day before made her calm down a little. “He even covered my nakedness and gifted me with a beautiful dress,” she thought to herself. He held her hand and led her to the Nile river’s shore. He let go and stood back watching her.
— Mirette Baghat, A Coffin of Roses
The same ratios that govern music give laws to optics and to the movement of the heavens as well. Simple. Elegant. Predictable.
— John Pipkin, The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
...but at night when he turns the awkward [telescope] skyward, he catches his breath at the clarity of the image and the vast populations of stars unknown to him until then, the riotous glittering in the dark crevices between constellations, a convocation of bright spirits waiting to be found.
— John Pipkin, The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
Sketches of mad skies spilling stars caught in spiraling gyres, diagrams for constructing sextants tall as a man and armillary spheres to mimic the motion of the cosmos. He decides that he must have all of it, that he will cram the little observatory with maps and charts, clocks and compasses, and instruments for bringing the sky nearer.
— John Pipkin
As the eclipse progresses, a confusion of chattering birds sweeps low in search of dusk and their shadows skip over the water’s surface and it makes perfect sense that these small creatures should be so moved by events beyond their reckoning.
— John Pipkin, The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
Christopher's heart bled that night and he could not sleep. Deborah who used to call him numerous times in a day and send countless messages was now not answering his calls. And she never called him.
— Ayibu Makolo, The Farewell
So we will cover every possibility. We will take turns at the telescope. I will keep watch in the day, and at night you will take my place, and together we will see to it that no part of the sky goes unobserved.
— John Pipkin, The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
Convention itself, like metaphor itself, is not dead; but it is always dying.
— James Wood, How Fiction Works
Alexier found that a dose of humility did wonders to one’s ability to grasp new ideas and, after all, it had been this very ability that made him the researcher he was today.
— I. H. Richardson
Nick got home the first week in December, to find New York still wallowing in its post-Armistice euphoria. Service men were celebrities wherever they went, and nothing was too good for them-especially the ones who were wounded-until it came down to such practical matters as finding housing or a job...It too him awhile to come to the conclusion that all the talk about help for veterans was just that, and anything that was done for him would have to be done by himself.
— Nathaniel Benchley, Speakeasy
This is a work of fiction, and the people in it are fictitious. The ghosts are real.
— Nathaniel Benchley, The Visitors
Why do you think movies and fiction authors invent vampires, lottery winners, and soulmates? I'll tell you why: because watching someone brush their teeth, shop for sandwich meat, and change the toilet paper roll is as mind-numbing for the observer as it is for the observed. Problem is, we live the toilet paper life, not the vampire life.'....'But we expect the vampires.
— Ann Wertz Garvin, I Like You Just Fine When You're Not Around
The problem was not an issue of availability because there were African girls everywhere. Christopher met them in church, in bars and in the cafeteria on the ground floor of the Sir Duncan Rice library.
— Ayibu Makolo, The Farewell
He tracks the rise and fall of the glittering darkness thronged with specks and tendrils of luminous secrets. Falling stars crackle in the cold air and prickle his skin. They flash in the corner of his vision where the eye’s discernment of light and shadow is most acute.
— John Pipkin, The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
If your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours.
— J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla: Coleccin de Clsicos de La Literatura Europea "Carrascalejo de La Jara"
A story is a wedding in which we listeners are the groom watching the bride coming up the aisle. It is together, in an act of imaginary consummation, that the story is born. This act wholly involves us, as any marriage would, and just as no marriage is exactly the same as another, so each of us interprets a story differently, feels for it differently. A story calls upon us...as individuals-and we like that. Stories benefit the human mind.
— Yann Martel
She was like a fire-cracker standing too close to a match: all potential energy, still wrapped up so neatly. He wanted to watch her explode. Hell, he was the match. He wanted to make her explode.
— Christina Lauren, The House
You know this has really affected my ability to trust myself. No matter what happened in my life, I was always able to trust myself. My instincts. Two men in a row carrying on indiscretions makes me feel like I made up some story. Almost like a fiction, Iwrote in my mind that had a beginning, middle and end. It feels like I manufactured some ideal life that was a made-up invention that I needed to believe was the truth.
— Jacqueline Simon Gunn, Circle of Trust
Instead, I read books in the library, huddling on a bean bag in a corner and getting lost in somebody else's victories and troubles. I never had much time for fiction before. I preferred real life. Mathematics. Solutions. Things that actually have a bearing on my life. But I can understand now why people read, why they like to get lost in somebody else's life. Sometimes I'll read a sentence and it will make me sit up, jolt me, because it is something that I have recently felt but never said out loud. I want to reach into the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they are not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's okay to feel like this. And then the lunch bell rings the book closes and I'm plunged back into reality.
— Cecelia Ahern
The feeling, all encompassing, safe and warm like a blanket permanently draped over her shoulders, follows her around. She takes it into the shower, to meals with her mother and sister, to work as she reads out the news script, her voice never faltering.
— Zainab Omaki, Side Babies: Contemporary Women In Africa
Writing a modern novel in a national language hence means writing with the awareness that you inhabit the same world as others around the globe. You see the same world map and the same world history as your contemporaries elsewhere, though how each of you interprets and relates the same historical events may vary greatly.
— Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English
Jamin knew that by morning, when he was done paying the girl in exchange for her slipping out without causing a fuss, he would be flat broke. But that did not matter. It was money well spent.
— Stanley Gazemba (Bahati Books)
I am convinced that if stories such as these have any lasting value, it is in revealing the kind of work young pulp-writers were doing in those days when rates were low and one had to make a typewriter smoke in order to keep eating.
— Hugh B. Cave
The carcass was still warm - barely a few minutes dead, with the blood clotting on the ugly wound on its head where Pinchez had bashed it in with a brick.
— Stanley Gazemba (Bahati Books), Nairobi Echoes
every man has his own story, his own agony("The Watcher O' The Dead")
— John Guinan, The Supernatural Omnibus: Being a Collection of Stories of Apparitions, Witchcraft, Werewolves, Diabolism, Necromancy, Satanism, Divination, Sorcery, Goetry, Voodoo, Possession, Occult, Doom and Destiny
There is no man but carries in his breast the makings of a story, which, though never told, comes more home to him, than any the mind of another man can find and fashion in words("The Watcher O' The Dead")
— John Guinan, The Supernatural Omnibus: Being a Collection of Stories of Apparitions, Witchcraft, Werewolves, Diabolism, Necromancy, Satanism, Divination, Sorcery, Goetry, Voodoo, Possession, Occult, Doom and Destiny
What has been his cause for searching the heavens day and night, for testing the limit of his reach hour by hour like a man trapped inside an expanding balloon? The reasons were as various as the days they consumed: to grasp the workings of the universe, to find something more beyond earth's fretful compass, to put his name to a discovery and secure fame's immortality, to be able to point to a map and proclaim simply: here I am.
— John Pipkin, The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
Her calculations have always held the utmost accuracy, but mathematics alone will not be enough to guide her; she must learn to trust in chance and, if need be, in accident.
— John Pipkin, The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
What has been his cause for searching the heavens day and night, for testing the limit of his reach hour by hour like a man trapped inside an expanding balloon? The reasons were as various as the days they consumed: to grasp the workings of the universe, to find something more beyond earth’s fretful compass, to put his name to a discovery and secure fame’s immortality, to be able to point to a map and proclaim simply: here I am.
— John Pipkin, The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
Each new scientific fact gives rise to new uncertainties, and every pattern of starlight holds both a record and a prophecy.
— John Pipkin, The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
The heavens are too immense, too beautiful and varied, to fit into the mind of any one deity; the murmured creeds of fathers and sons are no match for the astronomer’s gasp.
— John Pipkin, The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
Nothing in heaven or earth is content to be alone, and so there must always be something more. The universe is governed by a principle no more complicated than this: that a solitary body will forever attract another to itself.
— John Pipkin, The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
It is one of the great blessings of youth, this guiltlessness, the source of gentle sleep and peaceful days.
— John Pipkin, The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
Wisdom tolerates blustered opinions, the better to dismiss them later with discovery.
— John Pipkin, The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
It is only the sudden and unpredictable appearance of comets that spoils the immutable celestial sphere.
— John Pipkin, The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
The basis of English law is as simple as this: If you would know the future’s shape, look to the past.
— John Pipkin, The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
Is this not the very thing that drives an adventurous man to navigate uncharted oceans, to traverse continents and mountains, to pilot virgin estuaries and hidden coves—this promise of inscribing a name steadfast upon what he finds? There are few parcels of earth left to be claimed; yet even as the known world shrinks, the heavens grow ever more infinite. An explorer of the skies need never leave his home or fret over the swiftness of other expeditions; he might give whatever name he chooses to any new thing that wanders into his view.
— John Pipkin, The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
But if watching the sky is to be his duty, how should he begin? Now and then he has spotted one of the five bright planets or recognized a constellation, but he knows little about the turning of the heavens. When he contemplates the great distances between this and that, and the vast multitude of solitary objects spread over the celestial dome, he cannot fathom how one goes about searching for what is yet unknown.
— John Pipkin, The Blind Astronomer's Daughter
In almost all other professions a man must be able to observe carefully and report accurately what he has seen. Those qualifications are unnecessary for journalists, however, since their job is to write sensational stories that sell newspapers.
— Robert Anton Wilson, Masks of the Illuminati
I want to confess. I thought that her story was comprised of scenes. I thought the tragedy could be glamorous and her grief could be undone by a sunnier future. I thought we could pinpoint dramatic events on a time line and call it a life.But I was wrong.
— Nina LaCour, Everything Leads to You
I hardly know her but whenever I see her I lose my mind. I know I should run away, but I can’t.“That’s called sexual attraction, honey,” Max said. “It’s very nice. But be careful. It can burn you bad. Believe me I know.
— Vanda, Juliana: Volume 1: 1941-1944
One day, I decided to be an island. I took off my clothes and walked into the sea, then floated there, bobbing along with the tide, suspended by my inflatable tube and water wings.
— Ng Yi-Sheng, LONTAR #5
All this simply shows us that communalism and terrorism are nothing but opposite sides of the same coin. They keep feeding on each other in a vicious cycle, resulting in a society full of violence, hatred, sorrow and intolerance. Every communal act is used as a justification for mindless acts of terrorism . Similarly , each act of terrorism is used as a justification for such horrible atrocities like genocide and ethnic cleansing. And, it is always the innocent who get killed. This is the sad truth.
— Vivek Pereira, Indians in Pakistan
I remember clearly the afternoon that she stood at the corner beside the door of the tourist centre in Gdansk.
— You Jin, In Time, Out of Place
At seventy-one you can't expect to hear a story, any story, and take it as it is. At my age a story stirs up a vortex that sucks into its eye more stories, and spits out still more. I must remember what I must.
— Miroslav Penkov, East of the West: A Country in Stories
The four of us got back into the car. In an instant, I distinctly heard a “soundless music”. It was the melody of friendship, the sound of a perfectly tuned quartet who got together by chance, four hearts playing in harmony.
— You Jin, In Time, Out of Place
The details of what we call our lives go sometimes to form patterns of meaning not unlike those to be found in our preferred sort of fiction.
— Gerald Murnane
Just when you see a kid selling a mascot,If you don't buy it because he winks, Not only that will be considered a "boycott",Xenophobically, it will also be a jinx!
— Ana Claudia Antunes, ACross Tic
Love is the connection between souls synchronized through heart beats. Quote from my upcoming book 'Always Be MINE
— Neha Daraad, Always Be MINE by Neha Daraad
As it turned out, the sachem had been dead wrong.The Europes neither fled nor died out. In fact, said the old women in charge of the children, he had apologized for this error in prophecy and admitted that however many collapsed from ignorance or disease more would always come. They would come with languages that sounded like a dog bark; with a childish hunger for animal fur. They would forever fence land, ship whole trees to faraway countries, take any woman for quick pleasure, ruin soil, befoul sacred place and worship a dull, unimaginative god. They let their hogs browse the ocean shore turning it into dunes of sand where nothing green can ever grow again. Cut loose from the earth's soul, they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable. It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all primary peoples.
— Toni Morrison
As the wind continued to howl and groan through her decaying body, she began to sing her story.
— Ken Liu, LONTAR #6
The long rays of sun stretched across the street and touched the twisted mabati tin roofs of the shops, creating a soft light that dulled the dust and rust, making them look almost beautiful.
— Stanley Gazemba (Bahati Books)
great literature is literature that speaks to deep, fundamental human truths and experience in a way that is relatable to the reader and that may provoke engagement or facilitate insight into these truths and experiences. If these truths and experiences are about breaches of the normal, then surely horror has a place in literature, and in facts may proffer deep engagement with the most profound aspects of our existence. Sometimes only horror can say what needs to be said.
— Jacob M. Held, Stephen King and Philosophy
In any random slaughter, the difference between living and dying rarely has anything to do with willpower, or wisdom, or pluck. It's just a matter of where you're standing. Two inches to the right, and the bus hits you. If your office is on the ninety-second floor instead of the ninetieth, you don't make it out in time.
— Joe Hill
Well, they've come a long way. To think that he now could access a secret document held in the Vatican archives, via electronic technology.
— Peter J. Tanous, The Secret of Fatima
Pak Karman hugged his wife’s gravestone tightly. “You left without saying farewell!” The whole of the graveyard was ablaze with light.
— Mohamed Latiff Mohamed, The Widower
They will try to ascribe a purpose to my death, as though it were a punishment, but don’t you do so, in order that I continue to live in all the shadows of your longing. I will always be in your sleep and your wakefulness. I will be with you praying, propitiating and yearning for you, in sadness, in sorrow, in dismay and in the most profound happiness.
— Mohamed Latiff Mohamed, The Widower
I think, therefore I am. My fingers that caress these rose and frangipani petals are a result of my thoughts. I feel content, tender. I feel entranced, ecstatic and besotted by the fragrance of the flowers and this is because of my thoughts.
— Mohamed Latiff Mohamed, The Widower
Rebecca woke up with her knees hurting and her fingers ice-cold, and the specifics of her life returned to her as the dream disappeared: weekend, hotel room, Baguio, memory, memory, memory.
— Eliza Victoria, LONTAR #4
To understand what's happening in the U.S. presidential election of 2016, you need to know what's going on in the year 2024! Soundscape: Where hearing is believing.
— Royce Flippin
But we will not bury our mother. We have no interest in putting her bones in soft ground, no desire for memorials and platitudes, no feelings attached to the organic detritus of her terminated existence.
— J.Y.  Yang, Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Two
I don't put much stock in remembering things. Being able to forget is a superior skill.
— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Before We Visit the Goddess
What is the nature of life?Life is lines of dominoes falling.One thing leads to another, and then another, just like you'd planned. But suddenly a Domino gets skewed, events change direction, people dig in their heels, and you're faced with a situation that you didn't see coming, you who thought you were so clever.
— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Before We Visit the Goddess
Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, our lives. Is that why we're fascinated by the steadfastness of stars? The water reaches my calves. I begin the story of the Pleiades, women transformed into birds so Swift and bright that no man could snare them.
— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Before We Visit the Goddess
Treat backstory like a pungent spice. I say this to encourage you to picture a jalapeno pepper that can set your mouth on fire, every time you even think about adding backstory into your book. What you need is subtlety.
— Sandy Vaile
Any moment now, I thought, he was going to wake up. Any moment.
— O Thiam Chin, Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Two
She lifts her eyes, and there is Death in the corner, but not like a king with his iron crown, as the epics claimed. Why, it is a giant brush loaded with white paint. It descends upon her with gentle suddenness, obliterating the shape of the world.
— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Before We Visit the Goddess
But inside loss there can be gain, too,like the small silver spider Bela had discovered one dewy morning, curled asleep at the center of a rose.
— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Before We Visit the Goddess
Backstory is like a flavour you can’t quite pick, lurking in the layers of a curry. You know it’s there and it enhances the flavour, but it’s intangible and fleeting. Use it sparingly!
— Sandy Vaile
Delayed gratification hints that something terrible is going to happen, and then delays the resolution. It’s that interval between the promise of something awful and it actually happening, where suspense resides.
— Sandy Vaile
Suspense doesn’t always have to be about physical danger. Making the reader worry is a universal concept that can be applied to any story.
— Sandy Vaile
Would you like to come in?" I said. My hands were sweaty. Inside my chest an ocean heaved and crashed and heaved again."I would," he said. I saw his Adam's apple jerk as he swallowed. "Thank you."I was distracted by that thank you. We had moved past the language of formality long ago. It was strange to relearn it with each other.
— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Before We Visit the Goddess
What I now ask of you is considered treason
— Onni Pernu
I’m unhappy doing just mole stuff. What’s wrong with me? Why couldn’t I look forward to digging my own burrow?
— Mary T. Kincaid, Mortimer
With patience and perseverance my day will come!
— Susan Segovia Munoz
She looked at me like I was stupid, the same look the girls in JC used to give me when I hadn’t heard of the latest boy band, or turned up at Zouk wearing unfashionable clothes.
— Jeremy Tiang, It Never Rains on National Day
Lim Oh Kee kills himself in the early hours on the 12th day of December, 1921. His last meal is rice and nothing.
— Evan Adam Ang, Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Two
Sometimes just getting through each day requires almost superhuman strength.
— Jojo Moyes, After You
She wasn't just a B-girl, she was carrying the whole ugly world in her eyes.
— Megan Abbott, Die a Little
They watch her when she comes to City Hall, they watch her at the social events, they watch the way she walks, hips rolling with no suggestion of provocation but with every sense that she knows more than any of the rest. A woman like that, they seem to be thinking, a woman like that has lived.Their wives from Orange County, they come from Minnesota or Dallas or St.Louis. They come from places with families, with sagging mothers and fathers with dead eyes and heavy-hanging brows. They carry their own promise of future slackness and clipped lips and demands. They have sisters, sisther with more babies, babies with sweet saliva hanging and more appliance and with husbands with better salaries and two cars and club membership. They iron in housedresses in front of the television set or by the radio, steam rising, matting their faces, as the children with the damp necks cling on them, sticky-handed. They are this. And Alice… and Alice…
— Megan Abbott, Die a Little
The child came to a stop beside her mother and stared up at her face as if she had never seen it before. It was the face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to Powell himself. The child turned her head quickly, and past the Negroe's ambling figures she could see the column of smoke rising and widening unchecked inside the granite line of trees. She stood taut, listening, and could just catch in the distance a few wild high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them.
— Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories