c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Prayer or not, I want to believe that, despite all evidence to the contrary, it is possible for anyone to find that one special person. That person to spend Christmas with or grow old with or just take a nice silly walk in Central Park with.
— Rachel Cohn, Dash & Lily's Book of Dares
She must have been very anxious about a first boy friend to fall in love with a Colgate boy
— Haidji
I couldn't write—or wouldn't write, at any rate—unable to face the grueling self-scrutiny that fiction demands
— Armistead Maupin, The Night Listener
Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades.
— Diana Gabaldon
All you need do, Bernie,”she gulped her toast soaked in coffee, “is present the truth as fiction.
— James Purdy, Cabot Wright Begins
My greatest qualification for writing fiction was my ability, as a child, to lie with a straight face.
— Ashwin Sanghi
The first draft doesn't have to be perfect, but it does have to be written!
— Heather  Robinson, Wall of Stone
She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there.
— Graham Greene, The Living Room
The simple truth is that the truth does not exist
—  it all depends on a person's point of view.
There are a lot of ways for a novelist to create suspense, but also really only two: one a trick, one an art.The trick is to keep a secret. Or many secrets, even. In Lee Child’s books, Jack Reacher always has a big mystery to crack, but there are a series of smaller mysteries in the meantime, too, a new one appearing as soon as the last is resolved. J. K. Rowling is another master of this technique — Who gave Harry that Firebolt? How is Rita Skeeter getting her info?The art, meanwhile, the thing that makes “Pride and Prejudice” so superbly suspenseful, more suspenseful than the slickest spy novel, is to write stories in which characters must make decisions. “Breaking Bad” kept a few secrets from its audience, but for the most part it was fantastically adept at forcing Walter and Jesse into choice, into action. The same is true of “Freedom,” or “My Brilliant Friend,” or “Anna Karenina,” all novels that are hard to stop reading even when it seems as if it should be easy.
— Charles Finch
So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don't hold on to them the sea will take them too.
— Rachel Cusk
You scared the crap out of me,” I shove his bare chest with a growl. “Wasthat you at the front door?”“Ya think?” He fires back with a raise of his eyebrows, taking hold of my armagain, as he practically drags me back toward the front entry.“Did it occur to you to say something?” I shoot back with a scowl. “I thoughtyou were some kind of psychopath.” My frown deepens, as I consider whether he might in fact be a psychopath.
— M.A. George, Aqua
With every fall of the sun and rise of the moon, I can hear it. The Prophecy. It echoes through the halls of time. It is written on the surface of every star. Even the sun and moon cannot withhold the news of the second coming. I hear it. And I fear it.
— Brian A. McBride, Dominion
I started to drink heavily, comfortably caught in the tentacle-like clutches of alcohol.
— Keith Steinbaum, The Poe Consequence
Characters are just extensions of my madness.
— Mark Tilbury
One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture
—  A pale blue eye with a film over it.
You have filled every fibre of my soul and the spaces in between
— Zahraa Arif, The Spaces in Between
I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don't know, they don't understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is. Like ants and August sun on a wound." - Carol Kennicott
— Sinclair Lewis
He had been held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking, rather than by a chain he could not break.
— Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd
Surely, she was too young to have so many ghosts.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire
I shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield before you are up; and I shall have breakfasted before you are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all.
— Thomas Hardy
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods
A pall fell over the room. A black shroud of disease and deathbeds and all the worst things from all the worst places. This mutant world, a tragic portmanteau, the unnatural marriage of two roots as different as could be. 'And do you, Ability take Vitriol to be your lawfully wedded suffix?' I wanted to scream objections to the unholy matrimony, but nothing came out. My mouth was clammy and dry, full of sand. Dr. Wilson smiled on, rambling about the benefits of Abilitol while my father nodded like a toy bobblehead immune to the deepening shadow in the room. As they spoke, I caught my mother's eye. I could tell by her face that she felt the deepening shadow too.Neither of us smiled.Neither of us spoke.We felt the shadow together.
— David Arnold
The trouble with crying over an onion is that once the chopping gets you started and the tears begin to well up, the next thing you know you just can't stop.
— Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn't anyone?
— C.S. Lewis, Letters to Children
Love is the greatest unseen force in the universe." - Cole
— Missouri Vaun, All Things Rise
Before the autumn of our years, there exists a time when we struggle to reconcile what we are with what we wish to be. This time can be known as summer. After spring gives us life, before winter takes it away.
— H.L. Sudler, Summerville
I couldn't believe it had taken me all these years to see this side of him. He tucked himself inside a shell, shutting himself away from others here because the palace had trapped him. Behind the books and the snippy remarks there was a curious, engaging, and sometimes very charming person.
— Keira Cass
There’s a German term- heimweh, homesickness. It’s a powerful sensation, like a narcotic. A yearning from home, but for something more- a past self, perhaps. A lost self. When I first saw you on the street, Katya, I felt such a sensation… I have no idea why
— Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden
The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children’s books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she’d been a little girl. There hadn’t been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes.
— Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden
The ocean drummed as loud as pulsating blood, eroding the sand, rushing the beach as if it had a point to prove. And like many things, it receded, was gone, and was replaced anew.
— H.L. Sudler, Summerville
Darkness crept through. Shadows pried at doors, teased dull edges of recollections that never quite took hold. Memories that would have shriveled under the blinding sun of daylight. And reason.
— Edward Fahey, The Mourning After
Writing is the one thing I know I will never grow tired of in life
—  the one thing I could do until the day I die and still feel like I haven’t done enough.
When I write, I do not like using ten dollar words. I like the fifty-centers. Everybody has fifty-cents, even those that are too proud to admit it.
— T.A. Cline
My spirit has been around far longer than my soul--I've lived several lifetimes already. And one this novel has been written, I will have lived several more.
— Terry A. O'Neal
I think the best fiction is about the absolute irrepressibility of love in the face of every circumstance to the contrary. Even in someone as dark, on the face of it, as Faulkner often is, there is that unquenchable glimmer...."Grace will ever find a way." I don't think fiction has to be hokey, or end up hitting you on the head with positivity, to be life affirming. I think all we have to do is go on down to the bottom of the truth and hang out there in the dark for a bit, with nowhere to go but up, and grace will find a way.
— Tim Farrington
She had traveled to more cities, had experienced more scenes, than anyone she knew, and still she had come away from it all with only an abysmal sense of dissatisfaction. When would it all begin, the good part of this story she was living? When would she find her destiny, her purpose? When would she have the control her mother wielded, the drive her father possessed? When would she cease living the same wretched days over and over? Why was she still feeling empty and meaningless? Why—after all this time—did her purpose in life still escape her?
— H.L. Sudler, Summerville
Carefully studying the delicate form of the doll, she was thinking how easy it was to wish for things as a child. Then nothing seemed impossible. Growing up, one realizes how many things one cannot wish for, the things that are forbidden, sinful. Indecent.
— Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
Curiosity is called curiosity because of how curiously it can creep into people’s behavior no matter what dangers are around.
— Elizabeth Newton
Even in the gay spots around town, he could walk in and suddenly realize he was the only person of color in the room. He faced questions in all the eyes he greeted. What’s he doing here? Does he think he’s one of us? How ironic that even here in the nation’s self-proclaimed “gay summer capital” he should feel unwanted, excluded.
— H.L. Sudler, Summerville
There is nothing so sexy as a good-looking man in a good-looking pair of shorts.
— H.L. Sudler, Summerville
He could not have faced her right then. He had started to sense their relationship was over, that she wanted more than he could ever give her. They hardly saw each other any longer, had nothing much to discuss, and had even ceased doing the one thing they were good at. Still, to smell the sheets where she had lain brought him a certain peace, lulling him to sleep under the veil of her perfume. He dreamed they were married, running beneath a flurry of white rose petals, and then a door slammed shut, and suddenly he was awake. He was back at Cedar House, and it was night and the room was dark.
— H.L. Sudler, Summerville
Knowing too much had turned him into something else, and he wasn't sure he liked this newer him, although he felt he could not stop being this other him, darker.
— H.L. Sudler, Summerville
You have chosen the path of darkness.
— Mary Grand, Free to Be Tegan: Free from the cult...to find love, to be herself
Do not mess with this man's threads!
— Graeme Simsion, The Rosie Effect
You can thank Henry Ford for that. He was a warlock, you know.
— Ian Richards
Warren was nearly hoarse as he wiped the tears from his eyes and face. "I need to change. I need to protect my family. I need to earn who I am.
— H.L. Sudler, Summerville
Maybe that was the best part. The beautiful peace that came with living her own story, knowing every turn of the page and tug of the heart was a new beginning.
— Melissa Tagg, From the Start
A poem can't do its work if you only read snippets of it.
— John Green, Paper Towns
We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters.
— John Green, Paper Towns
It's easy to like someone from a distance. But when she stopped being this amazing attainable thing or whatever, and started being, like, just a regular girl with a weird relationship with food and frequent crankiness who's kinda bossy, then I had to basically start liking a whole different person.
— John Green, Paper Towns
Meredith immersed herself in the novels. For some reason, fiction hit on the meaning of life so much more concisely than real life itself did.
— Elin Hilderbrand, Silver Girl
I once believed that life was a gift. I thought whatever I wanted I would someday possess. Is that greed, or only youth? Is it hope or stupidity? As far as I was concerned the future was a book I could write to suit myself, chapter after chapter of good fortune. All was right with the world, and my place in it was assured, or so I thought then. I had no idea that all stories unfold like white flowers, petal by petal, each in its own time and season, dependant on circumstances and fate. ~ Green Heart, Alice Hoffman
— Alice Hoffman
I think the future deserves our faith. But it is hard to argue with Emily Dickinson.
— John Green, Paper Towns
Funny how much we all suffer trying to spare others a bit of pain.
— Michael LaRocca, The Last Titan
Once I was King of the Titans. Now I need a MedicAlert bracelet and a subscription to the Safe Return program. Can you put out a Silver Alert on a god? I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.
— Michael LaRocca, The Last Titan
I have a question for you. When you were a little boy, is this the man you dreamed of becoming?
— Michael LaRocca, The Last Titan
Dead. Supposedly Suicide. That's how they'll kill Michael too. Make it look like a suicide or an accident of some sort.
— H.C. Deboard, The Great Wall of Silence: The Silent Political Takeover of the United States
I've learned that the most unbelievable is the most believable.
— H.C. Deboard, The Great Wall of Silence: The Silent Political Takeover of the United States
Schopenhauer wrote that to desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake. He was correct.
— Michael LaRocca, The Last Titan
I’ve been working on something that merges rap with classical…. I call it Baby’s Got Bach.
— Michael LaRocca, The Last Titan
I agree with Kilgore Trout about realistic novels and their accumulations of nit-picking details. In Trout’s novel, The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, the hero is on a space ship two hundred miles long and sixty-two miles in diameter. He gets a realistic novel out of the branch library in his neighborhood. He reads about sixty pages of it, and then he takes it back. The librarian asks him why he doesn’t like it, and he says to her, “I already know about human beings.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
At my age, every day that I overcome simple inertia is a victory.
— Michael LaRocca, The Last Titan
When I label something as fiction, people say it’s true, and when I label something as non-fiction, people say it is made up. If something is not 100% true, then I label it as fiction. After all, there is no half of a lie, is there?
— Robert  Black
She forgot: it was as simple as that. She just loved being with the guy. Possibly enough that not even their own wedding could screw it up.
— Tim Farrington, The Monk Upstairs: A Novel
Of all God’s creatures, only man kills with malice. Only man kills out of vengeance.
— R.H.Dickinson
I am occasionally desired by congenital imbeciles and the editors of magazines to say something about the writing of detective fiction “from the woman’s point of view.” To such demands, one can only say “Go away and don’t be silly. You might as well ask what is the female angle on an equilateral triangle.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society
Fear is a prison in which we place ourselves. You need only to press against the bars to realize that the door is always unlocked, and you are always free to leave.
— Luna DeMasi, The Black Swan Company
A good novel, one which entices the author as much as it beckons the reader.
— W.J. Raymond
Only fiction has the power to cross the mental barricades, to make strangers intelligible to each other, because it moves people's hearts as well as engaging their minds.
— Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It
We all have a book in us. The first step is recognising this. Writing it is a whole new journey.
— Kathryn  Joyce, Thicker Than Soup
A fear of the unknown: what was that called?Worse yet: a fear of the known.
— Joyce Carol Oates, Carthage
All these uses a valid; all these reading of the book are "correct". For all these readers have placed themselves inside this story, not as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the world of Ender's Game, not with my eyes only, but also with their own.
— Orson Scott Card
Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. You don't. I don't.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Before he went away, he had heard all about the self-made girl, and there was something in the picture that strongly impressed him. She was possible doutbless only in America; American life had smoothed the way for her. She was not fast, nor emancipated, nor crude, nor loud, and there wasn’t in her, of necessity at least, a grain of the stuff of which the adventuress is made.She was simply very successful, and her success was entirely personal. She hadn’t been born with the silver spoon of social opportunity, she had grasped it by honest exertion. You knew her by many different signs, but chiefly, infallibly, by the appearance of her parents. It was her parents who told her story; you always saw how little her parents could have made her. Her attitude with regard to them might vary in different ways. As the great fact on her own side was that she had lifted herself from a lower social plane, done it all herself, and done it by the simple lever of her personality, it was naturally to be expected that she would leave the authors of her mere material being in the shade.(…)But the general characteristic of the self-made girl was that, though it was frequently understood that she was privately devoted to her kindred, she never attempted to impose them on society, and it was striking that, though in some of her manifestations a bore, she was at her worst less of a bore than they. They were almost always solemn and portentous, and they were for the most part of a deathly respectability. She wasn’t necessarily snobbish, unless it was snobbish to want the best. She didn’t cringe, she didn’t make herself smaller than she was, she took on the contrary a stand of her own and attracted things to herself.Naturally she was possible only in America, only in a country where whole ranges of competition and comparison were absent.
— Henry James, Pandora
I want you to grab hold of the brass spindles and don’t let go.” When she did as he required, he spread her legs wider. “Hold tight, baby. This is going to feel so good.
— Maggie Adams
She’s the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She’s the self-made girl!(…)Well, to begin with, the self-made girl’s a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn’t self-made at all. We all help to make her, we take such an interest in her.
— Henry James, Pandora
Agnes always wanted to go out. Out was better than in. In was inside, in was interior, in was introspection.
— Kate Zambreno, Green Girl
What we often take to be the new is simply the old under some novel form.
— Henry James, Pandora
It’s hard for me to talk about love,' she said. 'I think movies are the way I do that.
— Anna North, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark
There's something in there," Matt said. "Something alive. It punched me.""Punched you?" Baldwin's face screwed up. "Are you sure a bat didn't fly into you? I bet there are a few in there."Matt rubbed his tender jaw. "Unless its name is Bruce Wayne, that wasn't a bat.
— K.L. Armstrong, Odin's Ravens
The American girl isn't ANY girl
—  she's a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species.
Let us be vulgar and have some fun, let us invite the President.
— Henry James, Pandora
They ordered punch. They drank it. It was hot rum punch. The pen falters when it attempts to treat of the excellence thereof; the sober vocabulary, the sparse epithet of this narrative, are inadequate to the task; and pompous term, jewelled, exotic phrases rise to the excited fancy. It warmed the blood and cleared the head; it filled the soul with well-being; it disposed the mind at once to utter wit, and to appreciate the wit of others; it had the vagueness of music and the precision of mathematics. Only one of its qualities was comparable to anything else; it had the warmth of a good heart; but its taste, its smell, its feel, were not to be described in words.
— W. Somerset Maugham
It's 1am, I have fiction to write!
— C.S. Woolley
Some books must be sipped slowly like a strong bourbon. Most books must be devoured more than once because as you age you distill more.
— Brandi L. Bates
First time I ever put pen to paper, I had one goal – to build something no one had ever thought of before.
— Carla H. Krueger
A ray of light made a rainbow through the mist. [His] words had given her a small glimmer of hope — the kind of hope she thought had disappeared from her life forever.
— Rachel Skatvold, Beauty Unveiled
I am a spinner of yarns
—  hopefully to transport the reader or listener to places I see in my minds eye.
Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.
— Neil Gaiman
Please don’t forget me, don’t let me fade away… I was here, I lived, and I loved…
— Dannielle Wicks, Fading Away
The shadow of a character is defined by its maker...while a heroine is personified by its actions and relatability. So writers can create a world with a heroine that has impact and finish with everessence lights at the dims of its shadows
— Raquelle Stepney, Rhythm of the Garden
Once-upon-a-time we buried the memories we didn't want.
— Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall
Stephen King once wrote, “Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear.” In a horror story, the victim keeps asking why - but there can be no explanation, and there shouldn’t be one. The unanswered mystery is what stays with us the longest, and it’s what we’ll remember in the end.
— Alan Wake
A romance book is designed to tell you something about love–its ability to endure, forgive, go the extra mile, care about someone, put someone else first.
— Dee Henderson
I have no inner life. I have no ‘intimate’ life. I am just what I-what to do. I move from one habitation to another like one of those-is it herit crabs? Taking up residence in others shells.(…)Others’ shells are fine. You come, and then you go. They’re gone
— Joyce Carol Oates, Carthage
It was the yearning she related to. Shriver seemed to understand the specific human pain of wanting and pushing away at the same time. It left her with a gorgeous ache, and when she turned the last page of the book and closed the cover, Norah's connection to the writer felt absolute. It was a breathless, consuming rapture....
— Ellen Meister, Dorothy Parker Drank Here
Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive.There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.
— Joyce Carol Oates, Carthage
I know that there are many essential biological differences between the sexes, of course. But not so many ‘culturally-mandated’ differences. In First World countries we’ve evolved beyond mere biology -it isn’t the fate of the human female to be pregnant continously until she wears out and dies.
— Joyce Carol Oates, Carthage
And I like your laugh, Sabbath; it’s inaudible.
— Joyce Carol Oates, Carthage
Perfect love, like perfect partner does not exist. We create our own perfect love. If you care to know, a a good partner is like a construction engineer. To build the kind of house he want, he must pick the material that best suits his needs and maybe his wallet too.
— Augustine Sam, Take Back the Memory
Being an author, writing a book was great fun. Publishing and marketing, not so fun.
— Wynne Stevens
I’m scared to fall asleep. I don’t want to see it...
— Rebecca Ybarra, Fall From Grace
Perhaps all romance is like that
—  not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life.
The Taellywood treasure beckoned us. All of us ached for God's wisdom. We had so many questions. We wanted to know why things happened the way they did. We needed to know. We desired the truth and we yearned for answers to many of life's questions.
— Pat Patrick, Taellywood Treasure Hunt
Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
There was something vaguely sad about the rock. It was as old as it looked, standing weathered and lonely amidst the stretch of sand, and its thoughts were quiet as it listened to the waves.
— Chew Chia Shao Wei, The Rock and the Bird
Shaw Centre has restaurants on the fourth floor, where the ACS boy can pull chairs out for her. Girls love this because no one else does it for them, especially not those sotong RI boys.
— Justin Ker, The Space Between the Raindrops
Merdeka!' the Malay man screamed.'Merdekaaaaaa!' the sea of people echoed.
— Mohamed Latiff Mohamed, Confrontation
But a bond is a bond. And when you’re young and haven’t yet learned to live in your own solitude, even a destructive bond can seem better than none.
— Elisabeth Elo, North of Boston
Amateur detectives in fiction had always annoyed Ella. They were so unrealistic. She didn’t intend to be the Rabbit Back version of Miss Marple or a cheap Baker Street knock-off, and she really didn’t like the idea of making the tabloids. That was no way to advance an academic career. She didn’t want to be an instrument of justice. She just wanted to do some literary research and earn a living.
— Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, The Rabbit Back Literature Society
Stories, whether they're good or bad, are expressions of interactions within society. Some may be seen as 'boring', but in their own right, they are still stories to explored. People throughout life have more exciting endeavours than others, and that can be the same for stories. It's just a matter of segregating comparisons between the senseless and the thoughtful. The norm and the unbiased. We are what we are. As are stories.
— Corey Dale-Gardener
Sex was the main component of her thoughts now. But love - and her desperate longing for it - had vanished from her heart like a migraine after a painkiller.
— Augustine Sam
To treat fiction as if it were a religious or moral sermon is about as far from the actuality of literature as it is possible to get and indeed it is, in my opinion, the purest form of intellectual barbarism.
— Edward Said
One of the things about writing that inspires--and impresses me, is the music words can make. And, like music, the spaces between the notes can mean as much as the notes themselves. -- The Jesus Horse
— Melinda West Seifert, The Jesus Horse
Presently a soprano voice of richness and depth floated from the open windows of the parlor, resonating over the darkening greenery. All at once it was as if the entire scene before them was awakened by that voice, infused with unexpected life: the western sky, streaked with bands of pale gold and purple; the two houses, standing gray and disconsolate against that sky; the clusters of trees casting deep black shadows here and there across the ground. The same voice that brought everything suddenly to life also drew them into another, much deeper world—a world that was normally hidden, a world that stretched out into eternity. Yusuke, who had at first looked on with a sense of distance as everyone else sat listening, their faces intent on the music, found himself being gradually drawn in as well, forgetting the moment and the place, lending his ear during that unworldly stretch of time as if entranced. No one spoke. The singing could not have lasted ten minutes, but when it ended he found the darkness all at once grew deeper.
— Minae Mizumura
The problem lies not with genre but with formula, which consists of seeing genre conventions as restrictions rather than mere guidelines, ends in themselves rather than possibilities.
— David Corbett, The Art of Character: Creating Memorable Characters for Fiction, Film, and TV
Unlike your mother," she said, exhaling, "I told the culprit immediately. I thought at the very least he would visit me in the hospital after it was all done, but the son of a bitch sent me a get well card. Can you imagine? Serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.
— Ellen Meister, Dorothy Parker Drank Here
We make fiction because we are fiction ... It lived us into being and it lives us still.
— Russell Hoban, The Moment Under the Moment: Stories, a Libretto, Essays, and Sketches
I don't know who you are," she thought, "but whoever you are, you're one hell of a player.
— Jeffrey Eaton, Murder Becomes Manhattan
Which one is more true -- unity in diversity of culture or diversity in unity of religion!
— Ajay, RESONANCE
The gossip will kill your Great Grandmother.
— Linda  Joyce, Bayou Born
...Sigerius realized that every academic looked like every other academic." - Bonita Avenue, p.49
— Peter Buwalda, Bonita Avenue
We work all our lives to be who we become. And, it's who we become that determines what becomes of us.
— Melinda West Seifert, The Jesus Horse
What we do in life echoes in eternity.
— Gladiator
Life really is a story, and every story comes to an end. At the same time, it seems we all leave in the middle of our own stories. It's who we become that gives the story body, form and meaning.
— Melinda West Seifert, The Jesus Horse
I was so enthused with literature -- not stuck on literature, but in love with letters -- that I was easily inclined to bring all the conversations round to works I had read or fictitious characters from my readings about whom I loved to talk
— Joseph Zobel, Black Shack Alley
She's still quite fit at ninety, fit enough to chew her food with her own teeth. Apparently she grew up in a house without a bar of soap, let alone tooth powder. Her family didn't have electricity until she started elementary school, and she'd never seen a train until the tracks of the Koumi line were laid in Saku. It's exactly as if she were born in the Edo period. These days, you only have to drive for five minutes to find a sparkling clean convenience store, with bright lights above shelves stocked with everything you could possibly need. Land that used to be fields of mulberry bushes is now crisscrossed by smooth, wide roads lined with video rental stores and fast food restaurants.I would say O-Hatsu has seen more changes in her lifetime than I have. After all, she lived for most of the century when this country was changing faster than it ever had before. Even so, I have a feeling that the inside of her head has remained much the same as when she was a girl. By "the inside of her head" I mean the way she sees the world around her—the language she uses to make sense of it. In my case, the very way I looked at the world and the words I used to understand it had altogether changed.
— Minae Mizumura, A True Novel
No girl can forget the day she lost her virginity, or the circumstance that led to it
— Augustine Sam, Take Back the Memory
Stories are Life’s instruction manuals.
— Robert Peate
Often, when I am able to check out a book, I read it a dozen times before returning it, desperate to remain lost in the magic of someone else's story.
— Amy Engel, The Book of Ivy
I am death; I am this blood, these ravaged lands, and this wanton destruction. – Panchali Draupadi
— Krishna Udayasankar, Kurukshetra
Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh.
— John Cheever
… the greatest mystery, the greatest wonder of creation is that we are capable of both relentless reason and boundless love ... It is not about what we are, but what we can become.– Govinda Shauri
— Krishna Udayasankar, Kurukshetra
Cynicism can blind one to subtler virtues
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Sentimentality was used because other political avenues were closed, and authors hoped that through it they could bring about a political change that would fulfill the egalitarian promises of the Revolution. Real political venues were unavailable, so fiction became a medium for authors to appeal to audiences for change.
— Todd M. Brenneman, Homespun Gospel: The Triumph of Sentimentality in Contemporary American Evangelicalism
The more we prepare for war, the more we make it a reality. Yet, it would seem, to prepare for war may also be the best and possibly the only way to avoid it.’ – Govinda Shauri, The Aryavarta Chronicles - Kurukshetra
— Krishna Udayasankar, Kurukshetra
A wise man does not step betwixt the beast and his meat
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
The proposition that primitive dream imagery might reproduce, albeit imperfectly, the experience of one's ancestors, including their terrors, was rather too existentially charged for post-modern sensitivities, for which the meaningless hypothesis of memory de-junking was much more appealing. Even worse, the notion that one's own ideation, one's own monsters, or indeed oneself as a monster, might be transmitted forward to future generations threatened deeply assumptions about the privacy of the mind and an individual's discretionary power of inviolable concealment over unedifying thoughts.
— Robert  Edeson
She's dead. So is your fat pansy. You can be dead, too, if you want.
— Richard Stark
...every harsh word spoken, every such act or even thought doesn’t just disappear - it hangs around somewhere in totality and some day it boomerangs to haunt us.
— Veena Nagpal, The Uncommon Memories of Zeenat Qureishi
For too long now divinity and destiny have legitimized what reason and compassion would not. An individual for a family, a family for the kingdom, a kingdom for an empire... And now – an empire for humanity.– Govinda Shauri
— Krishna Udayasankar, Kurukshetra
No one person is the cause for or consequence of all that happens. I am just the tenth man, the threshold, the turn in the tide. I stand here on the shoulders of humanity, a mere instrument of Time.– Govinda Shauri
— Krishna Udayasankar, Kurukshetra
Kill them. Kill them all. Remind the world what it means to be Arya. Remind the world what it is to walk with the gods. – Syoddhan Kauravya
— Krishna Udayasankar, Kurukshetra
Kill them. Kill them all. Remind the world what it means to be Arya. Remind the world what it is to walk with the gods.– Syoddhan Kauravyaw
— Krishna Udayasankar, Kurukshetra
We are at war. There will be scars. – Uttara Vairati
— Krishna Udayasankar, Kurukshetra
The Wheel of Time spins: there is beginning and there is end. But why does the Wheel of Time spin? Is it some divine force that propels it? Or is that force humanity, people in search of change and a better way of life?– Asvattama Bharadvaja
— Krishna Udayasankar, Kurukshetra
I have placed my faith in humanity, but faith in the universal becomes meaningless without faith in the individual. – Panchali Draupadi
— Krishna Udayasankar, Kurukshetra
Peace is one thing, revolution is another. You were either impatient or highly optimistic to think one would lead to the other. – Panchali Draupadi.
— Krishna Udayasankar, Kurukshetra
You… are the symbol of the revolution that will transform Aryavarta
—  you are the one who has brought us to this.– Panchali Draupadi
Men like you and I make myths, we weave stories to sanctify the life that has been given to us. But not Govinda. Men like him don’t make myths; they make destiny. – Kshatta Vidur
— Krishna Udayasankar, Kurukshetra
Without love, we would not comprehend compassion.- Govinda Shauri
— Krishna Udayasankar, Kurukshetra
A new age dawns, Uttara. The Wheel of Time has turned. Not too long from now – hopefully in our lifetime – Aryavarta will be a janapada, a realm ruled by its people, the largest such in the world!– Abhimanyu Karshni
— Krishna Udayasankar, Kurukshetra
Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don’t have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up—up, up. And … down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I’m on my feet again. See, I’m starting to roll it up again. Don’t try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could tear me away from this rock.
— Susan Sontag
Noble though it may be, our way of life is nothing but servitude. It does not take long for servitude to turn to subjugation.– Shikandin Draupada
— Krishna Udayasankar, Kurukshetra
That's not what I'm asking. I'm asking, what's your vice and what brand of trouble does it lead to?
— Neal Stephenson
Capital dictates the fate of humanity.
— Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Bumi Manusia
What was justice, after all, but a particular outcome?
— Suzanne Rindell, The Other Typist
That's the thing about fiction, that you live in it totally for a little while, but you must forget it, sometimes totally forget it, in order to go about the rest of your day.
— Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing
Perhaps she moves too slowly now, or the world moves too fast for her. She enters the lift, a giant wheel turns and steel cables lower the mechanized box. The lift drops down a black shaft, which exists at the heart of each HDB block. The country may be described, not as a place covered with blocks of public housing, but a topography where black vertical shafts, some forty storeys tall, rise out of the ground like trees.
— Justin Ker, The Space Between the Raindrops
Did you ever think much about jobs? I mean, some of the jobs people land in? You see a guy giving haircuts to dogs, or maybe going along the curb with a shovel, scooping up horse manure. And you think, now why is the silly bastard doing that? He looks fairly bright, about as bright as anyone else. Why the hell does he do that for living?You kind grin and look down your nose at him. You think he’s nuts, know what I mean, or he doesn’t have any ambition. And then you take a good look at yourself, and you stop wondering about the other guy…You’ve got all your hands and feet. Your health is okay, and you make a nice appearance, and ambition-man! You’ve got it. You’re young, I guess: you’d call thirty young, and you’re strong. You don’t have much education, but you’ve got more than plenty of other people who go to the top. And yet with all that, with all you’ve had to do with this is as far you’ve got And something tellys you, you’re not going much farther if any.And there is nothing to be done about it now, of course, but you can’t stop hoping. You can’t stop wondering……Maybe you had too much ambition. Maybe that was the trouble. You couldn’t see yourself spending forty years moving from office boy to president. So you signed on with a circulation crew; you worked the magazines from one coast to another. And then you ran across a little brush deal-it sounded nice, anyway. And you worked that until you found something better, something that looked better. And you moved from that something to another something. Coffee-and-tea premiums, dinnerware, penny-a-day insurance, photo coupons, cemetery lots, hosiery, extract, and God knows what all. You begged for the charities, You bought the old gold. You went back to the magazines and the brushes and the coffee and tea. You made good money, a couple of hundred a week sometimes. But when you averaged it up, the good weeks with the bad, it wasn’t so good. Fifty or sixty a week, maybe seventy. More than you could make, probably, behind agas pump or a soda fountain. But you had to knock yourself out to do it, and you were standing stil. You were still there at the starting place. And you weren’t a kid any more.So you come to this town, and you see this ad. Man for outside sales and collections. Good deal for hard worker. And you think maybe this is it. This sounds like a right town. So you take the job, and you settle down in the town. And, of course, neither one of ‘em is right, they’re just like all the others. The job stinks. The town stinks. You stink. And there’s not a goddamned thing you can do about it. All you can do is go on like this other guys go on. The guy giving haircuts to dogs, and the guy sweeping up horse manute Hating it. Hating yourself.And hoping.
— Jim Thompson, A Hell of a Woman
I mostly believe, deep in my bones, that life is very simply beyond description; regardless of what one makes of it, life always spills over the parameters of how anyone has chosen to define it.
— Cyril Wong, The Last Lesson of Mrs de Souza
I sat down in a booth, and the waitress shoved a menu in front of me. There wasn’t anything on it that sounded good, and anyway, one look at her and my stomach turned flipflops… Every goddamned restaurant I go to, it’s always the same way… They’ll have some old bag on the payroll — I figure they keep her locked up in the mop closet until they see me coming. And they’ll doll her up in the dirtiest goddamned apron they can find and smear that crappy red polish all over her fingernails, and everything about her is smeary and sloppy and smelly. And she’s the dame that always waits on me.
— Jim Thompson, A Hell of a Woman
Darling, in this family we don't call anyone a novelist who has not written more books than Jane Austen.
— Pansy Schneider-Horst
There used to be a rubbish heap under the great tree in Dhoby Ghaut with a sarabat stall parked next to it. It was a low, sprawling rubbish heap made up of the usual things—refuse from dustbins, paper, old tins and slippers and leaves from the tree above. Then one day, people forgot about it. They found a new dumping place and the old rubbish heap settled low on the ground. Time passed and its contents became warm and rich and fertile and people living in the area would take away potfuls of it to plant flowers in.Somehow, a rose cutting, slim as a cheeping chicken’s leg and almost brown, appeared on the rubbish heap one day.
— Gregory Nalpon, The Wayang at Eight Milestone: Stories & Essays
In its basic form, nursing can be seen as a duty, but beyond the incessant operational activities that lay the foundation of our daily work, the profession is all about grace. Helping people is a noble calling. It is a privilege to serve my fellow human beings. Fifteen years has seen many ups and downs at the workplace, but I have enjoyed serving the many patients who come into my care, and have prayed for the souls of those who were on the brink of death.
— Katherine Soh, Nurse Molly Returns
There are myriad kisses in a relationship: desperate ones as involuntary as breathing, stolen ones on crowded trains, ceremonial ones at the front door, routine ones as dispassionate as licking an envelope. It takes two to kiss, but does it take two to hold the memory?
— Stephanie Ye, Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume One
Soon I find myself squatting on the floor. I am still striking my face; not with my fists this time, but with wide-open hands. I am slapping myself. The sounds I make when my palms meet my cheeks are like an unrelenting round of applause. I am clapping myself. Or clapping for myself. I start to giggle.All the voices are receding now. I am no longer filled with rage or disappointment. I clap and clap and simply cannot stop.
— Cyril Wong, Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me and Other Stories
She remembered the way the damp, coarse sand had clumped to her legs and hands, and burrowed beneath her nails and into the folds of her clothes, and she had wondered why the British children in her storybooks were always excited about going to the beach—just as now she wondered why the light from the lighthouse seemed to be coming from the landward side of the expressway. “I thought a lighthouse is out at sea.
— Yu-Mei Balasingamchow, Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume One
If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people.
— David Foster Wallace
During the Japanese invasion, bombs had fallen from the sky and people could run for cover. Now, they exploded in the middle of the road, or in the fields while people were playing soccer.
— Mohamed Latiff Mohamed, Confrontation
His wife had also studied art in her hometown, and she could paint, but depending on such work for her livelihood was just not possible. As far as appearances went, she was definitely a real beauty. When she was young, she looked a little like Gong Li, but now that she was middle-aged, she had put on weight and gradually taken on more of a bell-shaped look, resembling Li Siqin. But no matter what, a wife always looks better than her balding, broadbellied husband.
— Chew Kok Chang, Other Cities, Other Lives
Nonfiction that smells like fiction is neither.
— David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks
Dear family,I am drafting a new laundry protocol for better and more considerate usage of the washing machine
— Koh Choon Hwee, Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume One
It was past midnight. From the carpark of the apartment blocks, a human figure with an unsteady gait emerged.
— Lim Thean Soo, Ricky Star
English. That was where I met him.
— Andrew Koh, Glass Cathedral
Brian organised for the body to be flown back.
— Jolene Tan, A Certain Exposure
The day the earth-moving machines arrived, it was as if aliens had invaded Earth. Overnight they appeared, diggers with huge scoops, plodding their slow and ancient ways across the landscape. By the next week they had multiplied and evolved into diverse forms—cranes with long arms, bulldozers and levellers, an assortment of lorries. All day they worked towards some unseen design, creating and removing debris, their latticework of tracks remaking and writing over the space. Untenanted and vulnerable, the attap huts offered no resistance.
— Karen Kwek, Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume One
To write is to reveal oneself.When I write something, fiction or non-fiction, I do not expect you to accept what I write, nor to agree with what I propose.I expect you to spend at least a tenth of a second to think about it - may be not about the characters, nor about the piece, but at least about the idea.
— Sanhita Baruah
The exhausted earth groaned and quivered under the monotonous glare of the sun. Spirals of heat rose from the ground as if from molten lava. A panting lizard crawled painfully over the fevered rock in search of a shady crevice. Cattle and dogs cringed under the scanty shade of the trees and waited for the rain to deliver them from the heat and thirst. Instead the heat grew more intense and oppressive each day, singeing and stifling all living things with an invisible sheet of fire, which only the rain could put out.The drought had persisted for over a month.
— S. Rajaratnam, The Short Stories and Radio Plays of S. Rajaratnam
For her and Nurul merely to share a meal cooked in their own kitchen was a triumph
—  to wake up together each morning a luxury.
My mind skipped to a sunlit Saturday morning a few months ago when Noah was supposed to be revising for his exams. I caught him looking out the window instead, distracted by a roving butterfly. “Noah, you’re supposed to be studying!” I scolded.He replied languidly, “I am! I’m studying what’s out there.
— Monica Lim, The Good, the Bad and the PSLE: Trials of an Almost Kiasu Mother
How you spend your time when you are not working or studying says everything about who you are and what is motivating your life.
— Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl
You battled monsters. You sweat and cried your way to this one prolific moment where you finally realize that those dark days and sleepless nights were pre-requisites to your becoming.
— Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl
I never want a girl to lose all hope that her life can’t completely turn around, even if she feels that she is at the edge, standing on one foot, and ready to say goodbye.
— Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl
We live in a world where there is such a clear definition of what a girl should be that it takes almost no effort at all to completely hate ourselves.
— Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl
Remember, nothing happens before it’s supposed to, so trust that, as you are striving for authenticity and personal excellence, the recognition of your life’s purpose is nearing closer.
— Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl