c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can’t live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When we’re distressed and go to therapy, our therapist’s job is to help us tell our story. Life doesn’t come with plots; it’s messy and chaotic; life is one damn, inexplicable thing after another. And we can’t have that. We insist on meaning. And so we tell stories so that our lives make sense.
— John Dufresne, Is Life Like This?: A Guide to Writing Your First Novel in Six Months
A dark shadow rose from the depth of the watercourse. Forced to crawl out of the oceans rolling waves, it struggled against the pull of the undertow. Rising, it moved further up the white sandy beach away from the cold water. The creature collapsed onto the cool sand as the crescent moon above shone on his sleek gray skin revealing two immense leather-like wings protruding from his back. Exhaustion clouded his mind. The darkness of night was soothing, refreshing. Somehow he knew it would bring him strength and sustenance. The creature watched as a great rolling storm cloud sunk into the salty water before him and he tried to remember why he had come.
— Alaina Stanford, As Darkness Falls
The regrets about all she had let go flooded her. Where had all that enterprise gone? All that energy? Why had she never traveled? Or had more sex when she could? She had bleached and annihilated every waking moment of the last twenty years. Anything, rather than feel.
— Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
I was hoping against hope he'd refill his Prozac so we could be in love again, but, sadly, that never happened.
— Piper Faust, Idiots I've Seen Naked
Your hair is like butterflies,” Sebastian said, giggling like a child.“That’s nice,” Firen said impatiently. “Keep moving.”“Fantastic. I always like my days better with a touch of insanity,” Gabriella quipped.
— Laura Kreitzer, Key of Pearl
You can't show me the Earth from space and fly right past the moon, entice me into this magical machine and invite me to come with you, and then ask me to stay behind!
— Elizabeth    Newton, Moon Man
The Professor is coming...
— M.K. Hopkins
Oh you're one of those people are you? The people who ask God for something and when they get it, they tell God to forget about answering that particular prayer because it's just happened. That's one of my pet hates, I'm sorry.
— Elizabeth    Newton, Furry Friends
All humans are insane, they exists because insanity exists.
— Prakhar Bansal
He's probably somewhere right now eating a Big-N-Tasty. The man has a coffee pot, a microwave, AND a mini refrigerator in his classrooom. If you plan on having a conversation with him, I suggest you do it over the phone. Otherwise, you'll need a motorcycle helmet just to avoid the Snickers shrapnel flying from his mouth!
— Piper Faust, Idiots I've Seen Naked
It's odd to imagine, of course: you pass a car on a lonely rural highway; you sit beside a man in a diner and share views with him; you wait behind a customer checking into a motel, a friendly man with a winning smile and twinkling hazel eyes, who's happy to fill you in on his life's story and wants you to like him - odd to think this man is cruising around with a loaded pistol, making up his mind about which bank he'll soon rob.' - Richard Ford, Canada
— Richard Ford
Quote from “Unexpected Tales from the Ends of the Earth”: “The only one everlasting love is the unrealized one. The love to this thing that you’d never had. Behind it is hidden the love to your own ego and feelings".
— Alexandar Tomov, Unexpected Tales from the Ends of the Earth
It's easy to make up weird stuff. It gets trickier when you want the weird stuff to be interesting and make sense.
— Brandon Mull
Fantasy leaves imaginations larger than it finds them.
— Brandon Mull
Sensationalism dies quickly, fear is long-lived.
— Agatha Christie, Death in the Clouds
You know there’s this gaping space between us, and if I leaned forward I’d grab Dex’s shirt without ever touching him. You know there’s a three-inch-thick glass wall separating us.Now we know, too.
— Rebecca Berto, Drowning in You
Not everyone can be rich,' Peter went on. 'Not everyone can be strong or clever. Not everyone can be beautiful. But we can ALL be brave! If we tell ourselves we can do it; if we say to our hearts, 'don't jump about'; if we carry ourselves like heroes... we can all be brave! We can all look Danger in the face and be glad to meet it, and draw our swords and say, 'Have at you, Danger! You don't scare me!' Courage is just there for the taking; you don't need money to buy it. You don't need to go to school to learn it! Courage is the thing, isn't it? Don't you think so, people? Aren't I right? Courage is the thing! All goes if courage goes!
— Geraldine McCaughrean, Peter Pan in Scarlet
I wonder, what kind of life would I have had if it hadn’t been for my mother’s tea-and-cookie parties? Perhaps it’s because of them that I’ve never thought of women as my enemies, as territories I have to conquer, but always as allies and friends - which I believe is the reason why they were friendly to me in turn. I’ve never met those she-devils you hear about: they must be too busy with those men who look upon women as a fortress they have to attack, lay waste and left in ruins.
— Stephen Vizinczey, In Praise of Older Women: The Amorous Recollections of András Vajda
Tell me a story,' demanded Fireflyer.'Why? Do you eat them, too, then?''Only the ohs and ayes and ees and oos. The Kays are too spikey and the zeds are too buzzzy and the ones with the dots get stuck in your teeth and the esses sometimes slide down inside your vest and tickle.
— Geraldine McCaughrean, Peter Pan in Scarlet
. I felt the sun graze my face as I sped further and further from it all. The only negative part about running was that at some point I knew I’d have to stop. I’d have to turn around and go back. And whatever troubles had haunted me when I left, would be waiting upon my return.
— Courtney Giardina, Tear Stained Beaches
Any subject we exclude from fiction will drop from our culture's memory.
— Emma Donoghue
Without stories, we’d have even more trouble recognizing what’s real.
— Amy Neftzger, The Orphanage of Miracles
Jesus honey, your husband ain’t dead, he’s in hiding.” He growled, watching her visibly flinch. - Jase Devlin
— Nina D'Angelo, Nowhere to Hide
If the shining sun blinds the eye,it makes sense. But to be blinded by gold and silver!
— I.R. Shankar
All our ancient history, as one of our wits remarked, is no more than accepted fiction.
— Voltaire, Jeannot et Colin
We built that Wendy House our own selves, for Wendy! And you can't keep a Wendy out of her own Wendy House!
— Geraldine McCaughrean, Peter Pan in Scarlet
You're not safe with me."He cut me off, seeming to growl. "I don't want to be safe. I want to be with you. You can't do this alone.
— S.G. Holster, Thirty Seconds to Die
I'm a minicamp body in 102-degree heat getting screamed at by the only other man my size: a middle-aged receivers coach they call Bow Wow.
— Christopher  Harris, Slotback Rhapsody
Burn wounds always elicited pain more terrible than anything else he had ever endured. He didn’t relish the idea of forcing himself to suffer through such agony. But it was necessary. Earth depended on them taking possession of the key. “It’s the only way out,” Andrew reminded him.“I understand that, but—”“The trials we have faced thus far have been minimal,” Andrew said, cutting off Sebastian’s retort. “What we seek is the key to the universe. You didn’t expect it to be easy, did you?
— Laura Kreitzer, Key of Pearl
Mmm.” Sebastian moaned. “It’s so delicious.” He laughed then. “It’s not the Poisonous Desert; it’s the Oreo Desert.” He scooped up handfuls of dirt and stones and funneled it into his mouth. He licked his palms, his teeth grinding against rock.“Did the plant scramble his brains?” Firen asked, her lips twitching just a smidgen.“The plant’s poison makes you delusional,” Gabriella informed as Egnatious and Firen yanked Sebastian to his feet. “He’ll probably be a bit Looneyville for a while.
— Laura Kreitzer, Key of Pearl
The city was a machine of its own, continuously producing. We were constantly pumped out through its assembly line, in different forms or models. We came hardwired with different stories, dark secrets, vices, and defects. Over time, we fail and come to find our end, but the city continues onwards.
— Cristina Martín
What are you doing?” Egnatious asked, eyebrows furrowed as he watched Gabriella do a flip.Firen mimicked Gabriella and turned to Egnatious. “Fun times. Go with it.” She didn’t even crack a smile, though her body language said she was laughing on the inside.Instead of following their act, Egnatious simply dove for an outcrop just as it began moving away. He nearly lost his balance, but Firen caught his flailing arms.“Are you having a seizure or something?” she jested, displaying a rare vein of humor.Egnatious sent her a queasy glare.
— Laura Kreitzer, Key of Pearl
I think I found your vampire,” Andrew said, except this time he wasn’t so amused.However, Gabriella was, her smile huge as she laughed, the sound a trill in the densely packed cold air.“You think this is funny?” The words came out surly, but Andrew couldn’t stop his lips from twitching over her amusement.“I thought they’d be bigger,” she said, stifling another round of giggles. “Are you okay?”“Just a flesh wound.
— Laura Kreitzer, Key of Pearl
He strained his ears, and the darkness felt heavier than before. Oppressive.“We’re hungry.” That came from behind him.“They smell tasty,” a voice to his left hissed.“I don’t like this,” Andrew said, feeling like the world around them was spinning with voices, taunting, echoing them.“I don’t like this,” a voice parroted. “I don’t like this. I don’t like this. I don’t like this.
— Laura Kreitzer, Key of Pearl
We need to talk," he insisted, opening the door to his jeep that was parked next to my car. I was still holding out hope this would end and I would see his smile soon. "What's wrong?" I retaliated before I go in. "There's something you need to know, something I haven't told you," he said, taking my backpack from me.
— S.G. Holster, Thirty Seconds to Die
The Ferryman will transport us across the moat,” Chris informed. “Yeah. This seems legit,” Gabriella quipped as Chris helped her onto the boat. Andrew followed behind.“Are you sure this isn’t a trick?” Egnatious asked.Again, uncertainty filtered into Chris’s blue eyes, but he nodded anyway. “This is the only way.
— Laura Kreitzer, Key of Pearl
Where are you taking me?” Andrew demanded, whirling on the Ferryman. His muscles tensed, hands curling in and out of fists.“To my master.” The voice was ghostly, whispers of black ash and death, words cold and detached.He had an idea who that was but asked anyway: “And who is your master?”No answer came.Andrew’s insatiable rage rose up and swallowed his grief like a yawning ocean mouth, the darkest depths surging to the surface to form a mighty tidal wave. He closed the distance and seized the Ferryman’s gaunt wrist. There was no substance, no life beneath the cloak. The Ferryman slowly turned his hooded head, and Andrew found himself looking into the black hole of a self-contained night. The olfactory of decay was a punch in the face. Andrew released the Ferryman’s wrist and hastily stepped back, rocking the boat as he put distance between him and the unnatural wind spilling from the gaping orifice. Andrew shivered, the tiny hairs on his neck saluting. The cloaked head faced forward again, and the wind died away.
— Laura Kreitzer, Key of Pearl
Before we go on from here, I just want to say," he paused and took a step closer to me and reached his hand out to my heart. "What I should have said back on the plane is I know you're real." His eyes narrowed, "I'll always fight for you, Lexi, in my own way.
— S.G. Holster, Thirty Seconds to Die
An ear-splitting screech pierced the silence, followed by another, striking his ears like metal against a hollow bell. The woosh woosh of wind being displaced brought Andrew’s attention skyward, and a glacial gust of paralyzing terror raced up his spine. The creature opened its mouth, and a blazing shaft of fire bellowed from above. Andrew barely had enough time to back beneath an awning for protection. Egnatious and Sebastian dove to the side while Firen sidestepped her impending doom, raising the katana in challenge.The screeching returned, except now the howls were coming from every direction.Firen’s chest heaved. “Did you see that?” she asked, her stormy eyes glinting with rapture and daring as she held her katana out, preparing for the next attack.“Did I see the dragon?” Sebastian asked, hysteria dangerously rising to the surface. He stood and brushed himself off. “Yes, I bloody well did see that enormous, scaly, fire-breathing dragon.
— Laura Kreitzer, Key of Pearl
I shook Alan’s hand and the feeling just grew stronger. It was a bit frustrating. Like when you’re looking for what to say and it’s on the tip of your tongue, but no matter how hard you try, it just keeps eluding you.
— Pamela Alvarado
For us, the playground of fiction is just as important as reality
— Ryohgo Narita
Reality is such a pain. Those of us who were fed up with that kind of reality decided to remake it. We’d set up a partition, separate what’s important to us from what was trash, put only the things we loved on our side, and got rid of the rest.
— Ryohgo Narita
Editing fiction is like using your fingers to untangle the hair of someone you love.
— stephanie   roberts
If reality is as equally valuable as fiction, then you should just chalk up the parts of the past you don’t need to your imagination
— Ryohgo Narita
Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story.
— Rudyard Kipling, Writings on Writing
There are two ways to ruin any chances of leading a happy life. The first is to chase a goal twenty-four hours a day, day after day, and gladly give up all the little laughs and joys that life has to offer in exchange for that ever-elusive moment of jubilation. The second way is far worse, in that it NEVER fails. You know what it is, Sam? Falling in love with someone who chases a goal twenty four hours a day.
— Ali Sheikh, Closure of the Helpdesk — A Geek Tragedy
My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author's story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, although he was never transformed into an insect, and although he never had a piece of food (an apple from his family's table!) lodged in his flesh and rotting there, devoted his whole life as a writer to describing his personal struggle with his family, with women, with moral law, with his Jewish heritage, with his Unconscious, with his sense of guilt, and with the modern world. Kafka's work, which grows out of the nighttime dreamworld in Kafka's brain, is *more* autobiographical than any realistic retelling of his daytime experiences at the office or with his family or with a prostitute could have been. What is fiction, after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming? The writer works to create a dream that is vivid and has meaning, so that the reader can then vividly dream it and experience meaning. And work like Kafka's, which seems to proceed directly from dream, is therefore an exceptionally pure form of autobiography. There's an important paradox here that I would like to stress: the greater the autobiographical content of a fiction writer's work, the *smaller* its superficial resemblance to the writer's actual life. The deeper the writer digs for meaning, the more the random particulars of the writer's life become *impediments* to deliberate dreaming.
— Jonathan Franzen, Farther Away
(From the Author Note at the beginning of the book.) Dorothy L. Sayers used to say that mystery stories were the only moral fiction of the modern world--because in a mystery, you were guaranteed to see that the bad got punished, the good got rewarded and in the end all was made 
— Mercedes Lackey, The Snow Queen
He pries me from his chest and drops his hand from the back of my head, tracing my ear, along my jawline. He snatches his fingers a moment before they press into my lip.
— Rebecca Berto, Drowning in You
No matter how hard you try to create a story that's completely fictional, parts of your own experience are bound to surface.
— Hiroshi Ishizaki, Chain Mail: Addicted to You
Gina was beautiful like a sunset. You see it and you think of how beautiful it is, and then it’s over and you move on. But Trista was beautiful like a song. The kind of song you play over and over and never get sick of hearing. The kind of song he wanted to write for her, but he knew he would never be able to string together the right combination of notes to show her how he really felt.
— Christopher Stocking, His Only Star
Fiction is just that–fiction. Yes, it is serious business, but it should also be taken for face value. It’s entertainment. It’s escapism. It’s 365 pages of relaxation.
— Rachael Wade
The only wand you'll ever need is a better-feeling thought.
— C.G. Rousing
Entering the foyer, Royale already decided that he would thank Shake once more for being by his side at Keena’s recital. But she stunned him by eagerly waiting for him just like old times—on her knees wearing only a collar and a leash.
— S.B. Redd, Temptation.com
...and I wondered, not for the first time, if some of life's tragedy arose when people put themselves in situations they were not by nature suited for.
— Charlotte Rogan
You know, in everyone’s life you go through just trying to learn what one times one is—one times one equals one.
— S.B. Redd, Warped Intentions
Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom with the enclosing force of horizons: no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past, without near-diagnostic physical description; no image undissolved into regulation Updikean metaphor; no overture without a dramatized scene to 'show' what's 'told'; no denouement prior to an epiphany whose approach can be charted by and Freitag on any Macintosh.
— David Foster Wallace, Both Flesh and Not: Essays
And the game of dominoes is much like life: You gotta play the bones you’ve pulled. It don’t matter if you got seven doubles in your damn hand.
— S.B. Redd, Presumption of Paternity
Sometimes strange fiction, becomes grim reality.
— Wayne Gerard Trotman
Pastor McFucking Bride this . . . Pastor McFucking Bride that. Fuck him!
— S.B. Redd, Presumption of Paternity
What did you tell me, Jesse? Sure Jake, Stephanie will do exactly what you tell her. Sure Jake, protecting her will be a piece of cake. “Snorting in disbelief, he added, “Being at war is safer compared to this shit, and it’s a hell of a lot easier than looking after your girlfriend.
— Nina D'Angelo, Nowhere to Run
Thank-you, son,’ said his father. ‘I want you to know we’re bothproud of you. Take care, and keep in touch if you can.’‘Or even better, visit!’ said his mother, ‘our home isn’t completewithout you!
— Chris Tinniswood, Nostradormouse
I look at the human sciences as poetic sciences in which there is no objectivity, and I see film as not being objective, and cinema verite as a cinema of lies that depends on the art of telling yourself lies. If you’re a good storyteller then the lie is more true than reality, and if you’re a bad one, the truth is worse than a half lie.
— Jean Rouch
Yes, the saint was underrated quite a bit, then, mostly by people who didn’t like things that were ineffable……a lot of people don’t like things that are unearthly, the things of this earth are good enough for them, and they don’t mind telling you so. “If he’d just go out and get a job, like everybody else, then he could be saintly all day long…” —from “The Temptations of St. Anthony,” by Donald Barthelme
— Donald Barthelme, Sadness
our destinies are intertwinedlike the stems of ivy on an oak tree.
— Chris Tinniswood, Nostradormouse
I have yet to face Writer's Block and I don't believe I ever will. It is much more difficult for me to shut my imagination down to get a good nights sleep than it is to prod it to life.
— Kenneth J. Ester, Hell in a Storm
In Woolrich's crime fiction there is a gradual development from pulp to noir. The earlier a story, the more likely it stresses pulp elements: one-dimensional macho protagonists, preposterous methods of murder, hordes of cardboard gangsters, dialogue full of whiny insults, blistering fast action. But even in some of his earliest crime stories one finds aspects of noir, and over time the stream works itself pure.In mature Woolrich the world is an incomprehensible place where beams happen to fall, and are predestined to fall, and are toppled over by malevolent powers; a world ruled by chance, fate and God the malign thug. But the everyday life he portrays is just as terrifying and treacherous. The dominant economic reality is the Depression, which for Woolrich usually means a frightened little guy in a rundown apartment with a hungry wife and children, no money, no job, and desperation eating him like a cancer. The dominant political reality is a police force made up of a few decent cops and a horde of sociopaths licensed to torture and kill, whose outrages are casually accepted by all concerned, not least by the victims. The prevailing emotional states are loneliness and fear. Events take place in darkness, menace breathes out of every corner of the night, the bleak cityscape comes alive on the page and in our hearts.("Introduction")
— Francis M. Nevins Jr., Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich
The wind blowing through the cracks in the walls was fitting for this isolated and lonely place.
— Nancy B. Brewer, Garnet
Love, it is said, is blind, but love is not blind. It is an extra eye, which shows us what is most worthy of regard. To see the best is to see most clearly, and it is the lover's privilege.
— J.M. Barrie, The Little Minister
I felt emotions of gentleness and pleasure, that had long appeared dead, revive within me. Half surprised by the novelty of these sensations, I allowed myself to be borne away by them, and forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
I read nonfiction."She reared back as if offended.
— Anne Osterlund, Salvation
War has been glorified by men who have never been shot at.
— Bobbye L. Hudspeth, Behind The Grey
We all fight for money, some for power, but most of all for love. But me, I fight to become a champion.
— Jonathan Anthony Burkett, Fighting To Become Champions
According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future.
— Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood
Now she has power and passion and the struggle has significance for me-let the momentary consequences be what they may. Suppose that in her pride she becomes giddy, suppose that she does break with me-all right! -she has her freedom, but she will still belong to me. That the engagement should bind her is silly-I want to possess her only in her freedom
— Søren Kierkegaard
Evil knows its time to end is soon at hand, hence why it is more than determined to succeed.
— Milkweed L. Augustine, The Chain Saw Man Cometh
I liked reading biographies of writers, even if (as was the case with Monsieur Rabelais)I'd never read any of their actual writing. I flipped to the back and found the highlighted quote ("NEVER USE A HIGHLIGHTER IN MY BOOKS,
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
We're living in an age in which everything is allowed, and democracy is being devoured and destroyed by that limitless freedom.
— Paulo Coelho, The Witch Of Portobello
And there it is! Bravo! I knew it was only a matter of time before Byron realized he had an audience. That man is simply incapable of keeping his shirt on when there are spectators. One Christmas Eve, he stripped his shirt off right in the middle of the choir's rendition of Oh Child of Bethlehem. Coincidentally, the next song was Come Let Us Adore Him and the imbecile actually launched into some interpretive dance.
— Kirt J. Boyd, The Last Stop
Galinda didn't see the verdant world through the glass of the carriage; she saw her own reflection instead. She had the nearsightedness of youth. She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear yet...She was, after all, on her way to Shiz because she was smart. But there was more than one way to be smart.
— Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
So now begins the first war with Cordelia' in which I retreat and thereby teach her to be victorious as she pursues me. I continually fall back, and in this backward movement I teach her to know through me all the powers of erotic love, its turbulent thoughts' its passion, what longing is, and hope, and impatient expectancy. As I perform this set of steps before her' all this will correspondingly in her' It is a triumphant procession in which I am leading her, and I myself am just as much the one who dithyrambically sings praises to her victory as I am the one who shows the way. She will gain courage to believe in erotic love, to believe it is an etemal force, when she sees its dominion over me, sees my movements. She will believe me, partly because I rely on my artistry, and partly because at the bottom of what I am doing there is truth. If that were not the case, she would not believe me. With my every move, she becomes stronger and stronger; love is awakening in her soul; she is being enthroned in her meaning as a woman
— Søren Kierkegaard
My great-great grandfather and I were the best of friends, although we never met
— Raji Singh, Tales of the Fiction House
If you want the extra-ordinary, you've got to be willing to forsake the ordinary' - Annie Grimes in Mr Alhourani's Dead Man's Spots
— D.M. Lee, Mr Alhourani's Dead Man's Spots
...we haven't had any accidents for months now...Everything on that island is perfectly fine.
— Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
I was murdered. Even though my heart continued to beat, I was very much deceased. All faded to black
— M.C. Webb, Fade to Black
Our friend Chewy doesn’t speak much, but he chews a lot of tobacco so we call him Chewbacco.
— Michael Diack, The Super Spud Trilogy
Foolish potato, talking to her like that won’t work. You’ve got to be mean and show off your foil-wrapped rigidity.
— Michael Diack, The Super Spud Trilogy
Bear with me G-Harrison because this is going to be a long speech. I’ve always had this feeling that the world is not enough and I won’t be happy in life unless I hold hands with a girl who has a golden eye and a gold finger; I beat the living daylights out a guy called Dr No; I get a postcard from my friend who lives in Russia which reads ‘From Russia with love’; I spend some time working for her majesty’s secret service; I play the Thunderball Super Spud lottery; I meet a guy called Moonraker; I finally get a licence to kill, which I applied for months ago; I buy a house with a view to kill for and I get a pet octopus called Octopussy. If only I lived twice and tomorrow never died, maybe then I would get a chance to fulfil my dreams.
— Michael Diack, The Super Spud Trilogy
Nonsense, this is my home and I must defend it. It’s time for Santa to get serious.
— Michael Diack, The Super Spud Trilogy
To want more was not just childish, but cowardly, and somehow constpatory too. Death was change; it led to new chances, new vacancies, new niches and opportunities; it was not all loss.
— Iain Banks
There are more than straight good and evil, aye, even more than law or disorders or fence-sittin'. There's prejudice, whimsey, affection, superstition, habit, upbringing, alliance, pride, society, morals, animosity, preference, values, religon, circumstance, humor, perversity, honor, vengeance, jealousy, frustration...hundreds o' factors, from the past and in every present moment, as decides what some one person'll do in an individious situation.
— Eve Forward Villains By Necessity
The unification of worlds is an author's priority, as one of them surely resides forbidden to the public.
— Pablo Andrés Wunderlich Padilla, Despondency: The Story of a Defeated Man
Man may deceive his fellow-men, deception may follow deception, and the children of the wicked one may have power to seduce the foolish and untaught, till naught but fiction feeds the many, and the fruit of falsehood carries in its current the giddy to the grave; but one touch with the finger of his love, yes, one ray of glory from the upper world, or one word from the mouth of the Savior, from the bosom of eternity, strikes it all into insignificance, and blots it forever from the mind. (Messenger and Advocate Oct 1934 pp 14-16)
— Oliver Cowdery
Dawn cackles as she guides me through the all-glass porch. Thinner, paler Reina shuffles about behind Dawn, watching as I slip my boots off. Although she tries to hide her hands, her fingers flicker nervously. I place my boots neatly on the floor of the porch beside the other pairs in the shadows under the coats. Music drifts through to us from a distant room – it’s the Beach Boys’ California Dreamin’. Dawn looks at me and I smile – they’ve put the record on for me. Dawn nods along happily. ‘Hear you’re a surfer boy!’ she says and she mimics riding a wave.
— Carla H. Krueger, Slaughterhouse
I am the happiest person on this world, who has never seen ups and downs in life. I got whatever I wished for… And I woke up!
— Rahul Rampal, Notorious Mind- Just Engaged
My great-great grandfather and I were best of friends, although we never met.Fire and shipwreck orphan us – 140 years apart. We escape to imagination to survive our fate. There, midst flights of whimsy we find one another. Companionship quells our loneliness. We create fables and tales, shields against a harsh existence. We must battle animals and humans of prey.Together, he, the future abolitionist-publisher James Thaddeus ‘Blackjack’ Fiction, and I vault from glory-laden adventures to tragedy and then to triumph. I am Raji Singh and this is my story.
— Raji Singh
...there are books...which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.
— Arundhati Roy
We can't change the world by shouting, but our words can have meaning if we give them enough respect.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
Let your dissent fuel you, your anger inspire you, your rage convey you, and your fury strike a chilling fear onto the spines of your enemies.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
it's through the simple things in life, through its games, when our minds mature the most and we grow knowledgeable. It's also when the cloth masks of our outer, false personalities are torn asunder, and we are able to see every last blemish of a man's genuine character that they hide beneath... no matter how dark or obscene it may be.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
there are some some times in life where you have to let your feelings go and do what must be done
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
Before I fix the world, I have to fix myself.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
While parchment may burn and gold may be stained or melted down, the things that are truly important to us will never lose their value.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
Love is not measured by acts or years, but by truth between two people.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
The preliminaries were out of the way, the creative process was about to begin. The creative process, that mystic life force, that splurge out of which has come the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, the Fantasie Impromptu, the Bayeux tapestries, Romeo and Juliet, the windows of Chartres Cathedral, Paradise Lost - and a pulp murder story by Dan Moody. The process is the same in all; if the results are a little uneven, that doesn't invalidate the basic similarity of origin.
— Cornell Woolrich
Most civilizations had more fiction than they did real history.
— Vernor Vinge, The Children of the Sky
It's a good day to do great things!
— Randy Lipnitzky, Dark Hero
the bleakest situations bring out the hospitality in all of us, but it's during the harshest we find out how strong we really are.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
With the threat of them being potential spies or saboteurs, nobody will argue against our actions, and history itself will vindicate us.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
Heralds don't sing about men who lived in orthodoxy or played it safe, they sing about men who lived an uncertain future and took enough risks to make your head spin.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
Woe is the mind of the common man, so easily controlled by the prospect of an ambition never to be truly attained. This is what tyrants live on and by what commoners are blissfully burdened and subdued.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
There is no right or wrong, only what we believe is more right or more wrong
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
If you focus your eyes towards the horizon, everything and everyone walking in front of you becomes a blurry mass. That's what everyone else became. All of their dark wool suits began to mesh into one, and they began to rhythmically march in unison, all while I gazed at the sliver of sky that seemed to be pressed tightly in between the skyscrapers. I kept on walking and staring at the sky, and I began to notice the skyscrapers becoming larger and larger, and before I knew it, I had to turn to get to my building, and of course, the automat.
— Cristina  Martin, The Automat
Hate did not give way to heroism.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
Respect the dead, learn from them, do not follow or avenge them.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
War was easy. The hard part was cleaning up afterward.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
We must kill the guard before we can enter the palace.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
That was enough dialogue for a few pages - he had to get into some fast, red-hot action.There weren't any more hitches now. The story flowed like a torrent. The margin bell chimed almost staccato, the roller turned with almost piston-like continuity, the pages sprang up almost like blobs of batter from a pancake skillet. The beer kept rising in the glass and, contradictorily, steadily falling lower. The cigarettes gave up their ghosts, long thin gray ghosts, in a good cause; the mortality rate was terrible.His train of thought, the story's lifeline, beer-lubricated but no whit impeded, flashed and sputtered and coursed ahead like lightning in a topaz mist, and the loose fingers and hiccuping keys followed as fast as they could. ("The Penny-A-Worder")
— Cornell Woolrich
a true leader must be able to command with an iron fist, not just a humble heart.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
Animals do not respect their master's brother, but they do respect their brothers as masters.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
A true leader is not meant to be greeted with unanimous praise by his people. A leader is meant to be questioned, to be suspect, to be hated. If he is not, then one can easily assume that either he has not challenged his abilities as a leader by making a decision that creates a split between the people, or he is forcing his subjects to bow before him.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
She shook her head. She was so pale under the diffuse lamp-light that she looked almost transparent, as if Simon could have looked right through her. The way, he supposed, he always had.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Fallen Angels
Even though we don't admit it, every single one of us aspires to be like somebody, whether they live in the world today, within the bard's lyrics, or on the pages in the Library
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
They were in a long line, an endless line, and as they burst from the wood there was an instant, the smallest part of a heartbeat, when all Catelyn saw was the moonlight on the point of their lance, as if a thousand willowisps were coming down the ridge, wreathed in silver. Then she blinked, and they were only men, rushing down to kill or die.
— George R.R. Martin
If we truly detach from our childhood and abandon our inherent romanticism, then we shred any bit of humanity left in us.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
Our relationship with literary characters, at least to those that exercise a certain attraction over us, rests in fact on a denial. We know perfectly well, on a conscious level, that these characters “do not exist,” or in any case do not exist in the same way as do the inhabitants of the real world. But things manifest in an entirely different way on the unconscious level, which is interested not in the ontological differences between worlds but in the effect they produce on the psyche.Every psychoanalyst knows how deeply a subject can be influenced, and even shaped, sometimes to the point of tragedy, by a fictional character and the sense of identification it gives rise to. This remark must first of all be understood as a reminder that we ourselves are usually fictional characters for other people […]
— Pierre Bayard, Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of The Hound of the Baskervilles
Without making a conscious decision to do so, Drew grabbed a fistful of her ridiculous blond wig and tugged.Some of her hair came with it and he felt a moment of satisfaction when she howled. Bianca’s real hair was a matted mess against her head. He looked at the wig in his hand and moved his gaze to the water fountain.Bianca’s eyes widened. “Don’t do it. Don’t you dare.” “Don’t do what? Don’t do this?” He dangled the wig above the fountain.She raised her hands and crept toward him. “Just give it back, Drew, and we’ll be even. Okay?”“Aaawww, is Bianca getting worried? Poor baby.”“Come on.”“Say you’re sorry.” He shook it up and down.“What? No way.”With a shrug, he tossed the wig into the water fountain.
— Lindy Zart, Dating Husbands
It is sometimes the minor, not the major, characters in a novel who hold the author's affection longest. It may be that one loses affection for the major characters because they suck off so much energy as one pushes them through their lives.
— Larry McMurtry, Roads : Driving America's Great Highways
Her eyes were a rich dark brown that were so deep, they reminded me of my sleepless nights, awake, staring into complete darkness. I felt compelled to look deeper, searching for something inside her, but her soul was covered and her eyes would not show me.
— Cristina  Martin, The Automat
Something refused to come into focus in my thinking. Indistinctly, as though in a fog, shapes moved toward me and retreated just beyond cognition. But that getting a hold of things is the uncertainty. As the Tractatus says right at the beginning, “The world is everything that is the case.” It seemed as though the Mammy≈Divas® were just like Steve Jobs, trying to have reality bent to their own wills. Objectively, the iPhone was a muddle of mysticism and logic—breakable glass, non-ergonomic design, lousy battery life, lousy irreplaceable battery, lousy headphone jack, lousy virtual keyboard, lousy email, lousy memory, lousy lice, etc., etc, and an interface that you had to adapt to by pretending as an article of faith that no adaptation was required. The Mammy≈Divas® promised a seamless racial interface—eternal blackness ordered and majestic. They put a benign face on their lust for panoptic power. They promised to discipline and punish with pancakes.
— Jon Woodson
And yet it was also true that the tumor could not be removed by our doctor, and as a result of that a strange medication had been given him that enabled my brother to become even more of an enigma than he was before, and as a result of that there came to exist not only the machine and the inertia that came with it, but a change of perspective among the townsfolk that was a result of their interactions with the various phases of my brother. And so it was that when the flood began to rear its terrible head, not only was there the inertia that we all had to deal with, but a sense of the sublime that we had begun to feel for the waters which had roared upon the horizon.
— Justin Dobbs
Inside the room there sat a rocker, which she sat on, and which had rocked her while she sipped the beer, because in spite of herself she had become so giddy to have so quickly relieved her heart that she allowed herself to lean backwards while in the rocker, which had made it possible for the rocker to rock her, although it was not her intention to be so rocked. Also there stood an ironing board with a still hot iron on it that was burning a yellow shift, and there was, among several items that were not as noticeable to the woman, and yet were noticeable enough to at least bear mention, a fake man."I hope you don't mind me asking," said the woman who lived in the room, but then while in her chair she nodded off.
— Justin Dobbs, Billy's Room
Listen: Common sense doesn't mean what it used to mean."-Matthias Chalmers, STAIRWAY2 HEAVEN
— Chaz Thompson, STAIRWAY2 HEAVEN
[…] there exists around the written world opened by the work a multitude of other possible worlds, which we can complete by means of our images and our words. Denying oneself this work of completion in the name of some hypothetical fidelity to the work is bound to fail: we can indeed reject filling these gaps in a conscious way, but we cannot prevent our unconscious from finishing the work, according to its priorities and those of the era in which it was written.
— Pierre Bayard, Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of The Hound of the Baskervilles
I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned, or a style of frock, a real public person, even a make of car. Then, I thought, I had a measure, I could guage the quality of the writing by its accuracy, by the extent to which it aligned with my own impressions, or improved upon them. I was fortunate that most English writing of the time was in the form of undemanding social documentary. I wasn't impressed by those writers (they were spread between South and North America) who infiltrated their own pages as part of the cast, determined to remind poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions and the there was a difference between fiction and life. Or, to the contrary, to insist that life was a fiction anyway. Only writers, I thought, were ever in danger of confusing the two.
— Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth
Writing is a pleasure but family is a blessing!
— Prentiss Grant, I Love You, Goodbye
Being a single parent on a part-time basis is tricky to navigate. That is what a racing widow has to do.
— Aly Grady, The Racer's Widow
I heart my job. I get to make things up for a living.
— Michelle M. Pillow
His cell-phone rang. Dominic fumbled for it on the nightstand next to the couch, the dim lights not helping his endeavour. He had piercing, generic, banal fluorescent lights on his face all the time at work and at University, it was so bad it made him loathe even natural sunlight. Lucky this apartment’s living room light had a dimmer. He flipped open his phone and said hello. ‘Hey Dom, how you doin’?’ a voice boomed. It was Ben. They proceeded to talk about the upcoming exams, which were deceptively close as it was week 10 at the moment. Yes, they would be alright. Yes, they would meet up afterwards. No, he hadn’t studied more than Ben had. As he clapped the phone closed after the genial conversation reached its natural nadir, he had forgotten most of what had been said
— T.P. Grish, Maldives Malady: A Tropical Adventure
Milcas raced out his door, anxious to find the answer to this riddle and discover the source of hope for a Roegan in Fargranther; the propellant of an unheard of, forgotten, impossible, and by all accounts, damned idea.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
One word came to mind: pee-yew. Evan tried to place the odor; it wasn’t a heap of decayed garbage or that of a spoiled fish. Truth be told, he smelled like rotten cheese.
— H.B. Bolton, The Serpent's Ring
The dominoes of fate are falling down as we are speaking, and Ferriar knows what will happen when the last one crashes down.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
Some justice, though did not deal with kindheartedness or good feeling toward others. No, justice had a darker side, a gray area where it mingled alongside vengeance, and only the wise and pure of heart were able to tell the two apart. That kind of justice was swift. It was only called upon afer mercy and morals fail. It was the darkest form of goodness known to anyone, even the gods, and required only the strongest, most daring men to bring about.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
Do not forget about the butterflies.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
They were rebellious through their artistic expression and their uplifting spirits
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
He is a free man, not because is in a poition of political power and influence that you will never be able to achieve, and not because he has more character and heart in his fingertip than you have in your entire being, but because he is a man, and is thus entitled to be free.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
The festive music died down and the granite pillars were replaced with rotted wooden beams as he continued down the alleyways. The scent of fresh flowers turned to mold, and the colorful mosiacs of honor and nobility were nonexistent. Run-down tenements were shadowed by its surrounding buildings, as if the capital itself wanted to conceal its existence.
— Evan Meekins, The Black Banner
He plunged into the foliage, and was swept into a humid, wet world of towering trees, animal chirps and thick ferns. After a few steps, he turned, and could barely make out the village. He walked a few more steps. He could see nothing now except for the thick trees and long ferns and grasses that surrounded him. He was enveloped into the confined space between trees, surrounded by the jungle heat and staccato chirps. He turned in the direction of the village, but could only see thick, dense trees. Hoping his sense of direction had not been muddled, he turned back around to the direction of the alleged ocean, and kept walking.Now the calls he heard sounded more and more strange. How far had he walked by now? The jungle, or rain forest, whatever it was, did not relent, and he kept on weaving into narrow gaps between the sturdy ferns and towering trees, pressing onwards. This continued for a seemingly oppressive amount of time, and he began to doubt his decision. To come to this place. To take a chance with his life, which was going in the right direction. Why couldn’t he be happy with the normal and mundane, he cursed, scolding his own stubbornness
— T.P. Grish, Maldives Malady: A Tropical Adventure
Evan ran his finger across the faded leather spines. He laughed at how silly some of the names were: Paint Your Roses Red, Edelweiss and Me, World of Mushrooms and Fungi, The Toadstool Diaries, Daffodils Unseen and Exotic Plants Unleashed, to name but a few.
— H.B. Bolton, The Serpent's Ring