c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I think it all basically breaks down to something like this: You have to look and feel great first. If you eat well, exercise and get enough sleep, you will have ample energy and the proper self-confidence to create and produce beyond your wildest dreams! Looking great and radiating positive energy, while presenting your highest quality work, is what will always make you the most valuable and only logical choice in whatever it is that you reach for.
— Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl
Although many things may still need to happen before you identify what your exact work will be, I know that every single person whom you’re meeting and every experience that you’re having is necessary to you discovering your purpose. They are points on a map leading you to the moment where a match will finally be lit and you will be able to see through the darkness.
— Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl
Recognize that you have been chosen to be alive, right now, at this exact moment in time and know that none of that is random. There is something about you, your past or your future that is required at this exact moment in history. We need to know who you are and what you have been through.
— Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl
He thought, that all men, trickled away, changing constantly, until they finally dissolved, while the artist-created images remained unchangeably the same. He thought that the fear of death was perhaps the root of all art, perhaps also of all things of the mind. We fear death, we shudder at life’s instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do. Perhaps the woman after whom the master shaped his beautiful Madonna is already wilted or dead, and soon he, too, will be dead; others will live in his house and eat at his table- but his work will still be standing hundreds of years from now, and longer. It will go on shimmering in the quiet cloister church, unchangingly beautiful, forever smiling with the same sad, flowering mouth.
— Hermann Hesse
Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
— John Cheever
Finding yourself and creating a life that feels authentic and safe is the hardest, most important work that we will ever do and for girls, especially young girls, there is no one more equipped to do this work.
— Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl
The only way that you can identify and then fulfill your life’s purpose is for you to love yourself, charge up your life and serve the world.
— Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl
Beautiful untrue things are even more beautiful when they're true.
— Marty Rubin
The rain is a screen that changes the colour of the sky, causing a sepia filter to fall over the city. It is as if the city has gone back in time, to the age before the invention of full-coloured photographs. Light becomes suffused and quiet.
— Justin Ker, The Space Between the Raindrops
Sometimes you have to let go a little bit and travel the path of least resistance but this doesn’t mean that you quit when things get tough, as you are working towards a goal! It just means that you may only be able to see a rough draft of your final destination, right now, and that it’s safe to explore along the way.
— Jennifer Elisabeth
As girls, we will do anything for the person whom we love. We will scale buildings in the rain or run through fire if it means saving our love’s life. There is absolutely nothing more life altering that the fire burning inside of our souls for the one we want most…
— Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl
For the girl without words, there is laughter for what is light, gesture for want, and tears for all that is dark. There is not much more. Names are nothing but extravagance.
— Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Blu's Hanging
Wine is bottled poetry
— Robert Louis Stevenson
It's fiction, the improbable is very probable in my worlds
— H.Q. Frost
Time will solve all the problems Chinese school graduates face. In our bilingual society, there are no more Chinese school graduates, only English school graduates who can speak Mandarin. These English school graduates probably can also read and write Chinese, but they did not go to a Chinese school, and they act and think differently from us. Drawing a line between us, they would never say they graduated from a Chinese school, because former Chinese school graduates, that is, the vanishing group of people that includes us, are second-class citizens. They, on the other hand, belong to the first class, the Chinese elite, English school graduates who are fluent in Chinese.
— Yeng Pway Ngon, Trivialities About Me and Myself
Reading is a collaboration between the writer and reader. Both parties must keep that in mind when dealing with a work of fiction.”{Guy Gavriel Kay}
— Guy Gavriel Kay
Lending my voice to a dedicated readership is a match made in heaven.
— R. Barri Flowers, Murder Aboard the Titanic
For most of us free-thinking, wild hearts, our relationship with God or the Universe will go through peaks and valleys – transforming into new concepts and beliefs, completely disappearing, at times, only then to instantly explode back into existence by something even as small as a sunset!
— Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl
Coincidence sometimes happens as in a fairy tale. Wong was in an emotional state of mind. Still smoking opium, he thought about Kwang’s long-dead father, who had arrived in Singapore from Amoy on the junk Nam Hong. The opium den now felt bare and lonely without all the old vibrations. It was also dark and damp and the small kerosene lamp was running low on fuel. Wong added more kerosene and mumbled to himself, “Tonight I am going to smoke my way to heaven!
— Ming Cher, Spider Boys
...and from here I realized, with the deepest sense of my being, that we can erect and dismantle the great walls of the world, but we will only truly survive as a species when we dedicate ourselves to removing the walls from within.
— Dawn Kohler, The Invitation: A Weekend with Emma
So. If this was some normal fictional young-adult book, this is the part of the story where after the film, the entire high school would rise to their feet and applaud, and Earl and I would find True Acceptance and begin to Truly Believe in Ourselves and Rachel would somehow miraculously make a recovery, or maybe she would die but we would Always Have Her to Thank for Making Us Discover Our Inner Talent, and Madison would become my girlfriend and I would get to nuzzle her boobs like an affectionate panda cub whenever I wanted.That is why fiction sucks. None of that happened. Instead, pretty much everything happened that I was afraid of, except worse.
— Jesse Andrews, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
The problem with thinking up a new and original idea within a novel is that you have to make sure that Kurt Vonnegut did not already think of it.
— Meena Kandasamy, The Gypsy Goddess
Luna, the thought of losing you is like losing my heart. You have me completely, and if you died because I wasn't there to protect you, it would kill me. I know you're strong, I know you're different, but that doesn't change my natural instincts. I still have to protect you.
— Justine Winter, Sapphire's Divinity
Good horror offers a sense of an upended, lawless world and that’s appealing to anyone who grew up feeling like an outsider.
— Christopher  Rice
In French culture, the best way of buying time or getting off the hook entirely in a thorny personal situation is to claim that it’s complicated. The French did not invent love, but they did invent romance, so they’ve had more time than any other culture on earth to refine the nuances of its language.
— Mark Zero, The French Art of Revenge
The French have a penchant for absolutism, for thinking that things are all one way or all another, which is why their politics are marked by a general inability to compromise and why they tend to hold their personal opinions until the bitter end, even after they have clearly lost an argument.
— Mark Zero, The French Art of Revenge
How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.
— John Banville
Freaky kids like us can’t ever be normal- Tyler says smugly- Our generation is some new kind of “evolutionary development”, my shrink says- “Normal” is just “average”, not cool. My latest diagnosis is “A.P.M”, Acute Premature Melancholia”, usually an affliction of late middle age, they think is genetic since Ty Senoir has had it all his life, too.You look if you might be A.P.M, too, Sky: that kind of pissed-off mopey look in your face like you swallowed something really gross and can’t spit it out.
— Joyce Carol Oates, My Sister, My Love
For in America this season is decreed “family season”. (Eat your hearts out, you pitiable loners who don’t have families!) Melancholy as Thanksgiving is, the Christmas-New year’s season is far worse and lasts far longer, providing rich fund of opportunities for self-medicating, mental collapse, suicide and public mayhem with firearms. In fact it might be argued that the Christmas-New year’s season which begins abruptly after Thanksgiving is now the core-sason of American life itself, the meaning of American life„ the brute existencial point of it. How without families must envy us who bask in parental love, in the glow of yule-logs burning in fireplaces stoked by our daddie’s robust pokers, we who are stuffed to bursting with our mummie’s frantic holiday cooking; how you wish you could be us, pampered/protected kids tearing expensive foil wrappings off too many packages to count, gathered about the Christmas tree on Christmas morning as Mummy gently chided: “Skyler! Bliss! Show Daddy and Mummy what you’ve just opened, please! And save the little cards, so you know who gave such nice things to you
— Joyce Carol Oates, My Sister, My Love
Find my weak points, but more importantly, find yours.
— Gutteridge Rene
If it ran, a Bean would shoot it. If it fell, a Bean would eat it.
— Carolyn Chute
I sit on the bed. I remember a golden bracelet, thin gold, an apple with a bite taken out of it for the clasp, and the words "I Love You," and I take it out from the box of treasures under the bed. I remember Mama said, "I mean it. Though we never say it in this family," as she put the bracelet around my wrist last Christmas. And I still believe her, what she said about love. We just never say it in this family.
— Lois-Ann Yamanaka
Reading takes the reader to faraway lands, new cultures, new and exciting adventures; you meet new friends and enemies; it takes the reader from the heights of the imagination to the depths of human emotions; all without taking a single step.
— Carlos Salinas
If it ran, a Bean would eat it. If it fell, a Bean would eat it.
— Carolyn Chute
For in America this season is decreed “family season”. (Eat your hearts out, you pitiable loners who don’t have families!) Melancholy as Thanksgiving is, the Christmas-New year’s season is far worse and lasts far longer, providing rich fund of opportunities for self-medicating, mental collapse, suicide and public mayhem with firearms. In fact it might be argued that the Christmas-New year’s season which begins abruptly after Thanksgiving is now the core-sason of American life itself, the meaning of American life„ the brute existencial point of it. How without families must envy us who bask in parental love, in the glow of yule-logs burning in fireplaces stoked by our daddie’s robust pokers, we who are stuffed to bursting with our mummie’s frantic holiday cooking; how you wish you could be us, pampered/protected kids tearing expensive foil wrappings off too many packages to count, gathered about the Christmas tree on Christmas morning as Mummy gently chided: “Skyler! Bliss! Show Daddy and Mummy what you’ve just opened, please! And save the little cards, so you know who gave such nice things to you”.
— Joyce Carol Oates
... she was a pudding of immaturity and precocious wisdom that had not yet set into a stable mold.
— Mark Zero, The French Art of Revenge
Unfortunately, our minds are our greatest assets, and our biggest flaws.
— Justine Winter, Sapphire's Divinity
How can you be kissing at a time like this? Have you no respect for the dead?
— Mark Zero, The French Art of Revenge
When you’re used to being in dangerous situations, you develop a sixth sense about your surroundings, about where possible enemies might be lurking, how many steps it will take to reach the next corner on a dead run, the best hiding places if bullets start to fly...
— Mark Zero, The French Art of Revenge
Never run upstairs when someone’s chasing you. Don’t try to quick-draw a man who already has his gun out. Never light a match in the dark in a strange building. Half of staying safe is just keeping your head and being prudent.
— Mark Zero, The French Art of Revenge
It wasn’t playing both sides of the fence – it was betting against yourself but still playing to win – and it encapsulated everything absurd and paradoxical that I loved about the French.
— Mark Zero, The French Art of Revenge
And I had just kissed my ex-girlfriend, who had cried, while my current girlfriend was in jail. So far, it had not been my best day.
— Mark Zero, The French Art of Revenge
I congratulate you on your success stealing the painting.
— Mark Zero, The French Art of Revenge
For a moment he came near to sharing their incredible belief—it would do no harm to mutter a prayer of thanks to the God of his childhood, the God of the Common and the castle, that no ill had yet come to Sarah's child. Then a sonic boom scattered the words of the hymn and shook the old glass of the west window and rattled the crusader's helmet which hung on a pillar, and he was reminded again of the grown-up world. He went quickly out and bought the Sunday papers. The Sunday Express had a headline on the front page—"Child's Body Found in Wood.
— Graham Greene
All of fiction is truthful. What you create is your own truth and no one can take that away or change it.
— Walter Dean Myers
I was so drunk I couldn't tell a vagina from a bullet hole
— Andrés Aloi, Black Wolf
It was unfair that people could pretend to be one thing when they were really something else. That they would get you on their side and then do nothing but fail, and fail, and fail again. People should come with warnings, like cigarette packs: involvement would kill you over time.
— Lauren Oliver, Rooms
She lives on the fumes of whiskey and the iron in the blood of her prey.
— Hilary Mantel, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
I read not for entertainment but to feel what the writer has felt while writing even though if it was fiction.
— Pushpa Rana, Just the Way I Feel
Pluto claimed that in ancient times, all humans had been a combination of male and female. Each person had two heads, four arms, four legs. Supposedly, these combo-humans had been so powerful they made the gods uneasy, so Zeus split them in half - man and woman. Ever since, humans had felt incomplete. They spent their whole lives searching for their other halves.
— Rick Riordan
He had panicked. Tessier cursed his own stupidity. He should have remained in the column where he would have been protected. Instead, he saw an enemy coming for him like a revenant rising from a dark tomb, and had run first instead of thinking.Except this was no longer a French stronghold. The forts had all been captured and surrendered and the glorious revolutionary soldiers had been defeated. If the supply ships had made it through the blockade, Vaubois might still have been able to defend the city, but with no food, limited ammunition and disease rampant, defeat was inevitable.Tessier remembered the gut-wrenching escape from Fort Dominance where villagers spat at him and threw rocks. One man had brought out a pistol and the ball had slapped the air as it passed his face. Another man had chased him with an ancient boar spear and Tessier, exhausted from the fight, had jumped into the water. He had nearly drowned in that cold grey sea, only just managing to cling to a rock whilst the enemy searched the shoreline. The British warship was anchored outside the village, and although Tessier could see men on-board, no one had spotted him. Hours passed by. Then, when he considered it was clear, he swam ashore to hide in the malodorous marshland outside Mġarr. His body shivered violently and his skin was blue and wrinkled like withered fruit, but in the night-dark light he lived. He had crept to a fishing boat, donned a salt-stained boat cloak and rowed out to Malta's monochrome coastline. He had somehow managed to escape capture by abandoning the boat to swim into the harbour. From there it had been easy to climb the city walls and to safety. He had written his account of the marines ambush, the fort’s surrender and his opinion of Chasse, to Vaubois. Tessier wanted Gamble cashiered and Vaubois promised to take his complaint to the senior British officer when he was in a position to. Weeks went past. Months. A burning hunger for revenge changed to a desire for provisions. And until today, Tessier reflected that he would never see Gamble again.Sunlight twinkled on the water, dazzling like a million diamonds scattered across its surface.Tessier loaded his pistol in the shadows where the air was still and cool. He had two of them, a knife and a sword, and, although starving and crippled with stomach cramps, he would fight as he had always done so: with everything he had.
— David        Cook, Heart of Oak
Losing maturity in one’s fiction for the sake of marvels and monsters can also mean losing propriety, and that’s not always a bad thing.
— Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions
In ActualHuman Rights are"caring" for Humans left on the planet
— Haider Ali
The defenders retreated, but in good order. A musket flamed and a ball shattered a marine’s collar bone, spinning him around. The soldiers screamed terrible battle-cries as they began their grim job of clearing the defenders off the parapet with quick professional close-quarter work. Gamble trod on a fallen ramrod and his boots crunched on burnt wadding. The French reached steps and began descending into the bastion.'Bayonets!' Powell bellowed. 'I want bayonets!''Charge the bastards!' Gamble screamed, blinking another man's blood from his eyes. There was no drum to beat the order, but the marines and seamen surged forward.'Tirez!' The French had been waiting, and their muskets jerked a handful of attackers backwards. Their officer, dressed in a patched brown coat, was horrified to see the savage looking men advance unperturbed by the musketry. His men were mostly conscripts and they had fired too high. Now they had only steel bayonets with which to defend themselves.'Get in close, boys!' Powell ordered. 'A Shawnee Indian named Blue Jacket once told me that a naked woman stirs a man's blood, but a naked blade stirs his soul. So go in with the steel. Lunge! Recover! Stance!''Charge!' Gamble turned the order into a long, guttural yell of defiance.Those redcoats and seamen, with loaded weapons discharged them at the press of the defenders, and a man in the front rank went down with a dark hole in his forehead. Gamble saw the officer aim a pistol at him. A wounded Frenchman, half-crawling, tried to stab with his sabre-briquet, but Gamble kicked him in the head. He dashed forward, sword held low. The officer pulled the trigger, the weapon tugged the man's arm to his right, and the ball buzzed past Gamble's mangled ear as he jumped down into the gap made by the marines charge. A French corporal wearing a straw hat drove his bayonet at Gamble's belly, but he dodged to one side and rammed his bar-hilt into the man's dark eyes. 'Lunge! Recover! Stance!
— David        Cook, Heart of Oak
Ready yourselves!' Mullone heard himself say, which was strange, he thought, for he knew his men were prepared.A great cry came from beyond the walls that were punctuated by musket blasts and Mullone readied himself for the guns to leap into action. Mullone felt a tremor. The ground shook and then the first rebels poured through the gates like an oncoming tide. Mullone saw the leading man; both hands gripping a green banner, face contorted with zeal. The flag had a white cross in the centre of the green field and the initials JF below it. John Fitzstephen. Then, there were more men behind him, tens, then scores. And then time seemed to slow.The guns erupted barely twenty feet from them.Later on, Mullone would remember the great streaks of flame leap from the muzzles to lick the air and all of the charging rebels were shredded and torn apart in one terrible instant. Balls ricocheted on stone and great chunks were gouged out by the bullets. Blood sprayed on the walls as far back as the arched gateway, limbs were shorn off, and Mullone watched in horror as a bloodied head tumbled down the sloped street towards the barricade.'Jesus sweet suffering Christ!' Cahill gawped at the carnage as the echo of the big guns resonated like a giant's beating heart.Trooper O'Shea bent to one side and vomited at the sight of the twitching, bleeding and unrecognisable lumps that had once been men. A man staggered with both arms missing. Another crawled back to the gate with a shattered leg spurting blood. The stench of burnt flesh and the iron tang of blood hung ripe and nauseating in the oppressive air.One of the low wooden cabins by the wall was on fire. A blast of musketry outside the walls rattled against the stonework and a redcoat toppled backwards onto the cabin's roof as the flames fanned over the wood.'Here they come again! Ready your firelocks! Do not waste a shot!' Johnson shouted in a steady voice as the gateway became thick with more rebels. He took a deep breath. 'God forgive us,' Corporal Brennan said.'Liberty or death!' A rebel, armed with a blood-stained pitchfork, shouted over-and-over.
— David        Cook, Liberty or Death
I’ll find out who’s inside. Wait here and keep alert!’ Hallam rasped. He skirted the main path to skulk towards one of the shuttered windows on the building’s eastern wall. There was a crack in the wood and he gently inched closer to peer inside.There was a hearth-fire with a pot bubbling away and a battered table made of a length of wood over two pieces of cut timber. A small ham hung from the rafters, away from the rats and mice. He couldn’t see anyone but there was a murmur of voices. Hallam leaned in even closer and a young boy with hair the colour of straw saw the movement to stare. It was Little Jim. Thank God, the child was safe. Snot hung from his nose and he was pale. Hallam put a finger to his lips, but the boy, not even four, did not understand, and just gaped innocently back.Movement near the window. A man wearing a blue jacket took up a stone bottle and wiped his long flowing moustache afterwards. His hair was shoulder-length, falling unruly over the red collar of his jacket. Tied around his neck was a filthy red neckerchief. A woman moaned and the man grinned with tobacco stained teeth at the sound. Laughter and French voices. The woman whimpered and Little Jim turned to watch unseen figures. His eyes glistened and his bottom lip dropped. The woman began to plead and Hallam instinctively growled.The Frenchman, hearing the noise, pushed the shutter open and the pistol’s cold muzzle pressed against his forehead. Hallam watched the man’s eyes narrow and then widen, before his mouth opened. Whatever he intended to shout was never heard, because the ball smashed through his skull to erupt in a bloody spray as it exited the back of the Frenchman’s head.There was a brief moment of silence. ‘28th!’ Hallam shouted, as he stepped back against the wall. ‘Make ready!
— David        Cook, Blood on the Snow
He felt as though the bones of his ribcage were snapping beneath the weight of the stone that God had laid over his heart.
— Daniel Silva, The Heist
In all ages woman has been the source of all that is pure, unselfish, and heroic in the spirit and life of man.....poetry and fiction are based upon woman's love, and the movements of history are mainly due to the sentiments or ambitions she has inspired......there is no aspiration which any man here to-night entertains, no achievement he seeks to accomplish, no great and honorable ambition he desires to gratify, which is not directly related to either or both a mother or a wife. From the hearth-stone around which linger the recollections of our mother, from the fireside where our wife awaits us, come all the purity, all the hope, and all the courage with which we fight the battle of life. The man who is not thus inspired, who labors not so much to secure the applause of the world as the solid and more precious approval of his home, accomplishes little of good for others or of honor for himself. I close with the hope that each of us may always have near us: 'A perfect woman, nobly planned,To warn, to comfort, and command,And yet a spirit still, and brightWith something of an angel light.
— Chauncey Mitchell DePew
for I determined that if Death came he should find me ready
— Bram Stoker, Dracula
The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.
— Neil Gaiman, Evelyn Evelyn
I think the idea that we have anything to begin with is a lie we tell ourselves every day until we believe it. I think the law is there to enforce fictions that would not exist otherwise. Certain laws prevent us from deviating from those fictions, and thrive as a framework for the lifestyle we are all required to live. I believe that the reason possession is nine-tenths of the law is that without those laws there wouldn’t be any possession at all.
— Trevor D. Richardson, Dystopia Boy: The Unauthorized Files
The novel remains for me one of the few forms...where we can describe, step by step, minute by minute, our not altogether unpleasant struggle to put ourselves into a viable and devout relationship to our beloved and mistaken world.
— John Cheever
Playdate. (n) A Date arranged by adults in which young children are brought together, usually at the home of one of them, for the premeditated purpose of “playing”. A feature of contemporary American upscale suburban life in which “neighborhoods” have ceased to exist, and children no longer trail in and out of “neighbor childrens” houses or play in “backyards”. In the absence of sidewalks in newer “gated” coummunities, children cannot “walk” to playdates but must be driven by adults, usually mothers. A “playdate” is never initiated by the players (i.e., children), but only by their mothers.In American-suburban social climbing through playdating, this is the chapter you’ve been awaiting.
— Joyce Carol Oates, My Sister, My Love
Marika could feel herself cocking the trigger of a loaded gun and pointing it at herself, because the truth could be too shocking a revelation, something that would shake their lives to the core... but lies were just a dead-end alleyway that offered no way out.
— Mirella Muffarotto, Soccer Sweetheart
There are only two things in life,' Bergé said. 'Love and beauty.
— Mark Zero, The French Art of Revenge
This was a crime of passion, but unlike most crimes of passion, it had been meticulously and diabolically well-planned.
— Mark Zero, The French Art of Revenge
There are tales that rise like the early sun, breathe, and take on a life of their own. There are ones that flow quietly and effortlessly until time forsakes them, but there are others that fight until they find their way to the edge of reality, as if coming straight out of a dream.
— Edwin Fontanez, The Illuminated Forest
I likes me some ‘Shit Blows Up’ fiction, don’t get me wrong.
— Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions
Bergé’s yelling had attracted the attention of everyone in the Kibati hall: champagne flutes stopped halfway to heavily painted lips, eyes widened, massive diamonds groaned scornfully in their settings. It was a stationary riot.
— Mark Zero, The French Art of Revenge
Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.
— Neil Gaiman
... The use of your gift for good is your responsibility. You must decide for yourself.
— Thomas Sweeney, The Harem
Have you ever believed in something so completely that you were willing to give up everything and everyone in your life to protect it?
— Thomas Sweeney, The Harem
The destruction of something beautiful can appear so entertaining.
— Thomas Sweeney, The Harem
My eyes refuse to let him leave, but he stands still holding my hand, lingering for as long as possible.
— Thomas Sweeney, The Harem
Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible.
— C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature
What would you like for your own life, Kate, if you could choose?”“Anything?”“Of course anything.”“That’s really easy, Aunty Ivy.”“Go on then.”“A straw hat...with a bright scarlet ribbon tied around the top and a bow at the back. A tea-dress like girls used to wear, with big red poppies all over the fabric. A pair of flat, white pumps, comfortable but really pretty. A bicycle with a basket on the front. In the basket is a loaf of fresh bread, cheese, fruit oh...and a bottle of sparkly wine, you know, like posh people drink. “I’m cycling down a lane. There are no lorries or cars or bicycles. No people – just me. The sun is shining through the trees, making patterns on the ground. At the end of the lane is a gate, sort of hidden between the bushes and trees. I stop at the gate, get off the bike and wheel it into the garden.“In the garden there are flowers of all kinds, especially roses. They’re my favourite. I walk down the little path to a cottage. It’s not big, just big enough. The front door needs painting and has a little stained glass window at the top. I take the food out of the basket and go through the door. “Inside, everything is clean, pretty and bright. There are vases of flowers on every surface and it smells sweet, like lemon cake. At the end of the room are French windows. They need painting too, but it doesn’t matter. I go through the French windows into a beautiful garden. Even more flowers there...and a veranda. On the veranda is an old rocking chair with patchwork cushions and next to it a little table that has an oriental tablecloth with gold tassels. I put the food on the table and pour the wine into a glass. I’d sit in the rocking chair and close my eyes and think to myself... this is my place.”From A DISH OF STONES
— Valentina Hepburn, A DISH OF STONES
We are one.
— Thomas Sweeney, The Harem
I am a knight riding from tower to tower seeking a princess to rescue but all the dragons are slain, the towers are empty and the princesses taken.
— Pieter Niemand
...there are women who devote themselves entirely to their families, their husbands and children, and give up cultivating their femininity. Mother rebelled against that paradigm...[Mr. Gregory's Mother]
— Sveva Casati Modignani, Mister Gregory
If freedom is free and none need worry, then what blood drops for thee?
— Ryan Goodrich, Starved for Bullets: A Collection of Scars
When you turn around, you'll see something I bet you've never seen before. If it takes your breath away, then you'll fit in nicely. If you don't feel anything, then maybe you don't belong here.
— Veronica Randolph Batterson, Daniel's Esperanza
All the great novels are about obsession and people who are obsessed.
— Marty Rubin
According to Mark, it was a custom of the Roman governor during the feast of Passover to release one prisoner to the Jews, anyone for whom they asked. When Pilate asks the crowd which prisoner they would like to have released—Jesus, the preacher and traitor to Rome, or bar Abbas, the insurrectionist and murderer—the crowd demands the release of the insurrectionist and the crucifixion of the preacher. "Why?" Pilate asks, pained at the thought of having to put an innocent Jewish peasant to death. “What evil has he done?” But the crowd shouts all the louder for Jesus’s death. "Crucify him! Crucify him!" (Mark 15:1–20). The scene is absolutely nonsensical. Never mind that outside the gospels there exists not a shred of historical evidence for any such Passover custom on the part of any Roman governor. What is truly beyond belief is the portrayal of Pontius Pilate—a man renowned for his loathing of the Jews, his total disregard for Jewish rituals and customs, and his penchant for absentmindedly signing so many execution orders that a formal complaint was lodged against him in Rome—spending even a moment of his time pondering the fate of yet another Jewish rabble-rouser.
— Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
Stallions," Frank said, "they're fightin' over a girl. - DANIEL'S ESPERANZA
— Veronica Randolph Batterson, Daniel's Esperanza
You look within and upon and around me, savoring every inch. You pull my ear for no reason, and I can tell you really don’t want to cry. As a tear falls between by breasts, I look away and pretend the grass is a jungle, and the ants, little kings of forgotten tribes.
— Virginia Petrucci, Best New Writing 2014
To get girls he had figured out that all you had to do was talk little, the bare minimum, and listen much, without ever passing judgment. [Mister Gregory]
— Sveva Casati Modignani, Mister Gregory
Thanks to Dashiell Hammett. "He was thin, walked with a stick, and was the only private dick I knew who used the pockets of his sport coat. Maybe that means something, maybe not." Ramone Ramone, 2013
— Thomas Dekooning, The Corsican Dove
Sin says, "Do you think that people get married with aspirations to divorce? Do you think that people try drugs with the motive to be addicted? No. It is not merely the act that you see taking place, but it is I that has taken their minds captive. I have played the lobes of their minds like the strings on a harp; soothing them and making them feel, see, and hear the images that they desire in their innermost being.
— Stephen and Tiffany Domena
But Pierre had been born with a shrewdness that made him early aware that a failure to believe that human events were ordered by a higher power was regarded by many in the highest positions as obnoxious and even sinful, and as nothing was to be gained by exciting such hostility, it was better to give a silent or even smiling assent to the fatuous idealism to which, particularly in youth, one was so relentlessly exposed.
— Louis Auchincloss, East Side Story
This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.
— Neil Gaiman, The Books of Magic
Novelists congratulate themselves on their creation of this kind of “character” or that kind of “character,” and readers pretend to talk knowingly about “character,” but all it amounts to is that the writers are enjoying themselves writing lies and the readers are enjoying themselves reading lies. In fact, there is no such thing as character, something fixed and final. The real thing is something that novelists don’t know how to write about. Or, if they tried, the end result would never be a novel. Real people are strangely difficult to make sense out of. Even a god would have his hands full trying.
— Sōseki Natsume, The Miner
An exceptional woman with all the desired qualities exists only in a man's imagination.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
A large piece of lead floated out of Bobby head, followed by dark chunks of what could only be pieces of Bobby's brain.The torrent started up again. It flowed steady rather than pulsed with his heart. I knew from that, and from the amount of blood, that it was that mofo vein bleeding. And probably more than a small tear if the amount of blood was telling. I thought there had to be a hole the size of Montana in that thing."Jesus Mother Mary" I said, then "Stitch!"The scrub tech slapped a needle holder into my palm, a curved needle and silk stitch clamped into the end of it. I might have closed my eyes—I've been told I do that sometimes in surgery when I'm trying to visualize something—though if so I don't remember doing it. I took that needle and aimed it into the pool of blood."Suck here Joe, right here."When I thought I could see something, something gray and not black red, I plunged the pointy end of the needle through whatever the visible tissue was and looped it out again. I cinched it down and tied it quick, then repeated the maneuver again after adjusting slightly for lighting, sweating, my own bounding heartbeat, and the regret I wasn't wearing my own diaper.We're losing, I thought.
— Edison McDaniels, Juicing Out
I do not need a scabbard to sheathe my mind.
— Fuyumi Ono, The Twelve Kingdoms: Skies of Dawn
He wishes he could remember everything. Anything. He doesn’t sense a bone in his body that can feel compassion or worthiness. Self-pity hides away as well, the lowest form of emotion not even capable of resting in his wrecked mind.
— Christy A. Campbell, A Halo Sun
Six month of sitting home, six month of doing absolutely nothing but watching TV, going out, sleeping, getting drunk and sleeping again. Oh no, wait, I was busy with something, I was doing some renovations in my new apartment. Which legally became mine only a month ago. Yep, that's what all my life has been about, spontaneous decisions and living in the moment. Because right now technically I'm a 25-year-old illegal immigrant from Russia, four years in New York, no papers, no work authorization, no work itself. Only a crazy life filled with restaurants, shops, beauty salons, clubs and restaurants again. How is it all possible? Very simple. I used to be a stripper.
— Ellie Midwood, The New York Doll
Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence
—  many epic tales are pretty much epic crap.
Like the 'good' characters in literature, the sane don't have any memorable lines.
— Adam Phillips Going Sane
There are monsters among us. I mean this quite literally.
— Edison McDaniels, BLADE MAN
I used to go to church. I even went through a rather intense religious period when I was sixteen. But the idea of an everlasting life -- a never-ending banquet, as a stupid visiting minister to our church once appallingly described it -- filled me with a greater terror than the concept of extinction...
— Louis Auchincloss, East Side Story
There’s so much to learn. So much to enjoy. So terribly much to be curious about. Take your life and run with it. Make a habit of being alive. This much of anything, I have learned. And am still learning.
— Carew Papritz, The Legacy Letters: his Wife, his Children, his Final Gift
Edmund doesn’t solve any of his grievances or personality disorders by going through the wardrobe. If anything, they're exacerbated and brought to a crisis by his experiences in Narnia. When you go to Narnia, your worries come with you. Narnia just becomes the place where you work them out and try to resolve them.
— Levi Grossman
It's best not to get settled on things being a certain way, I realized. Life had a funny way if interrupting your plans.
— Tracey Porter, Billy Creekmore
There is no truth, only science and fiction.
— Steven Brewis
Finishing my thoughts aloud meant saying how my dad had passed, and I had failed. How I had smoked joints and lay in bed enabling my hopelessness. I’d been the ugly in my world.
— Rebecca Berto, Converge
There was no starting point for the rebellion, but I could mark an arbitrary one: that a grown-up was someone who, first and foremost, could drink a Coke at whim.
— Teju Cole, Open City
Why not?
— Howard Feigenbaum
People in books were always so charming, and all their thoughts and actions so comprehensible. They all invariably had a clear, well-defined object in life, and strove through a few hundred engrossing pages to attain this object. They were all noble and generous, and their lives were bright and beautiful. What interesting and delightful moments Irene had passed in their society! They had made her laugh and cry and suffer and rejoice, and had entertained her with the brilliancy of their wit. How dull and colourless real people had appeared beside these heroes and heroines of fiction.
— Aimée Dostoyevsky, The Emigrant
A novel, though fiction, often speaks to the largest truths.
— Mark Rubinstein
If I could turn my thoughts into spoken words and share them with someone, they’d become real and mean something. Now, they were only lines that could be erased when I didn’t feel them anymore or hopeful thoughts that, like shadows, would disappear when the sun went away. - Rebecca Meyer, Crooked Lines
— Holly Michael, Crooked Lines
Not the least of the hardships to which the dying are subject is the visitation of their loved ones. The poor darlings, God bless them, may feel every impulse to condole and console, but their primary sensation is nonetheless one of embarrassment in the presence of the unspeakable and a guilty gratitude that it is not yet their fate.
— Louis Auchincloss, East Side Story
Her heart was telling her to trust him, but it wouldn’t be the first time that that foolish muscle, there in the middle of her chest, had betrayed her.
— Mirella Muffarotto, Soccer Sweetheart
Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.
— Neil Gaiman
No matter how many romantic poems you recite, no matter how many glorious tales of love you read, how can you really understand the condition if you've never found yourself in it?
— Sherry D. Ficklin, Queen of Someday
Granted, there is always much that is hidden, and we must not forget that the writing of history - however dryly it is done and however sincere the desire for objectivity - remains literature. History's third dimension is always fiction
— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
Most stories are not about peoplebut about life, an addiction like the rest of themthat destroys you even as you love it,but you love it anyway and can never get enough.
— Michael Hogan, Winter Solstice
Fiction is overrated, Fly. We’ve discussed this. In the time it takes those novelist fuckers to contemplate a few poetic passages, a thousand kids die from malnutrition. Immediacy, man, that’s what counts.
— Rawi Hage, Carnival
Family is a permanent adhesive that creates a lifetime bond.
— Conrad Brooks
I’m a reader who uses fiction as a way of worrying about life.
— Lorin Stein
His kiss was light but lingering, like smoke from shivering lips on a freezing winter morning.
— Rebecca Berto, Converge
History is written by the survivors.
— Gareth Johnson, Fuente
In this strife-torn valley, I have always been tormented by feelings of indefinite and eternal uncertainty. "The Half Mother" is an outcome of those feelings.
— Shahnaz Bashir, The Half Mother
Good writing should help us see the world in new ways, it should crack open our generosity towards each other. That's what I hope my work does anyway. I want someone to read it and know that they aren't alone in the universe. I want my words to act as connective tissue.
— Patrick Hicks
Imagination is highly suspect. Reality is what is beautiful. But we are blind to it because it is familiar.
— Mal Peet, The Truth Is Dead
Fears can be a healthy thing, they give you something to conquer
— Alonna Williams, The Journal of the Redskull
Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
— Paul Auster, The Paris Review Interviews, IV: 4
Maryanne Burkhard and I have set up a B W Wrighthard profile on Goodreads. If any of you would like to friend us there, we would really appreciate it. And if you're feeling really generous and would like to review one or both of our books, we would be eternally grateful! We hope to do some fun things on there once we figure it all out. Thanks for your help and support!!!
— B W Wrighthard
That's sounds right. Another $5,000 went to dress up the Little League park where he had played so many games. Seems like he paid off the MORTAGE on his parents' home, which wasn't that much.
— John Grisham, Calico Joe
Fiction though it is a fiction, should be written in a way that it feels like a reality, a reality every reader willingly or sometimes unwillingly goes through, until the reader finishes reading and sometimes even after that.
— Arti Honrao
There was clairvoyance to their words and a tenderness in their inflections that instilled even in the most cynical of male hearts that faith and fate weren’t just words, they were our guides and as long as you kept your heart open, sooner or later love would find its way into it.
— Eric Monsky, Aversion
His only real financial failure came at the age of thirteen when, in an uncharacteristic error of judgement, he invested £200,000 of his own savings in wooden socks, an invention that never caught on as he had hoped.
— Mark  Jackman, Shadow of the Badger
The Butcher of Babylon featured in over 500 porn films between 1974 and 1982, and was best known for his motto: Come for the butcher, stay for the meat.
— Mark  Jackman, Shadow of the Badger
You, my reader, who see me close, wonder about my heartbeats and measure my words, you my close friend who know my eyes and the home of their prose, you, my only lover, who always move my life, my poetry's pace and rhyme,...I can not disclose the shape of metaphors, nor what they bashfully display behind the robes of their naked source; but you can use the eyes of heart to feel what they are made of. And if it's a tear or a smile I evoke, it means we are human, it means we care and we love. It means we are both beautiful. (Soar)
— Soar
He had been inspired to start a career in the porn industry after reading the incredible tale of a Japanese man who avenged the death of his sister by going down on her best friend for seven days and seven nights.
— Mark  Jackman, Shadow of the Badger
If a wizard should take up residence in your garden and requests food, you are obliged to feed him.
— Mark  Jackman, Shadow of the Badger
Eagles, buffalos and deserts vast, it’s no good living in the fucking past.
— Mark  Jackman, There's Something About Dying
The hamster-powered hat is the same as any other hat. It keeps your head warm and looks smart,' the inventor said. 'The hamster generates heat by running on the wheel. If you get a big enough hamster, it will keep your whole face warm.
— Mark  Jackman, There's Something About Dying
Did time move forward, through people, or did people move through it, like clouds across the sky?
— Anthony Doerr, About Grace
Suddenly, a voice called from the darkness. Taylor leapt like a salmon, then became rooted to the spot like a tin of salmon.
— Mark  Jackman, Shadow of the Badger
His only real financial failure came at the age of thirteen, when in an uncharacteristic error of judgement he invested £200,000 of his own savings in wooden socks, an invention that never caught on as he had hoped.
— Mark  Jackman, Shadow of the Badger
The hamster-powered hat is the same as any other hat. It keeps your head warm and looks smart,” the inventor said. “The hamster generates heat by running on the wheel. If you get a big enough hamster, it will keep your whole face warm.
— Mark  Jackman, There's Something About Dying
Many great people had been considered to be boring, like Nigel Mansell, but anyone who had read the racing driver’s autobiography, "Clutch Down, Dick Out", would know that perception was way off the mark.
— Mark  Jackman, There's Something About Dying
The marks we leave are too often scars.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
The more I learn about life and people, the more I realise that everyone has a story and everyone’s story is the biggest in their own mind.” - Laylla Jonson
— L.B. Malpass, Beneath the Blossom Tree