c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I am encouraged as I look at some of those who have listened to their "different drum": Einstein was hopeless at school math and commented wryly on his inadequacy in human relations. Winston Churchill was an abysmal failure in his early school years. Byron, that revolutionary student, had to compensate for a club foot; Demosthenes for a stutter; and Homer was blind. Socrates couldn't manage his wife, and infuriated his countrymen. And what about Jesus, if we need an ultimate example of failure with one's peers? Or an ultimate example of love?
— Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet
Mother's arms are made of tenderness, and sweet sleep blesses the child who lies within.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
I can't think of one great human being in the arts, or in history generally, who conformed, who succeeded, as educational experts tell us children must succeed, with his peer group...If a child in their classrooms does not succeed with his peer group, then it would seem to many that both child and teacher have failed. Have they? If we ever, God forbid, manage to make each child succeed with his peer group, we will produce a race of bland and faceless nonentities, and all poetry and mystery will vanish from the face of the earth.
— Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet
Strange combination, isn't it--gratitude and resentment? But this is the way I think. Actually, I think everybody thinks that way. Even the children of the humans who died long ago, I think they lived their lives holding similar contradictory thoughts about their parents. They were raised to learn about love and death, and they lived out their lives passing from the sunny spots to the shady spots of this world.
— Otsuichi, ZOO
I think our job as parents is to give our kids roots to grow and wings to fly.Deborah Norville
— Deborah Norville
But when adults speak up for the vulnerable and the weak, working and demanding that safety and respect prevail, God's little lambs are protected and nourished. They know they are not abandoned; they are loved. And the world becomes a little more like heaven as a result.
— Wess Stafford, Too Small to Ignore: Why Children Are the Next Big Thing
She understood children, and knew that they were adults handicapped by a humiliating disguise and had their adult qualities within them.
— Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows
Why are you sad?" Baby asked."Because some day you'll fly higher than high, and the blue will fill your eyes, and maybe you'll forget to come down," said Wishmoley.Baby snuggled next to him. "I'll never forget," she said.
— Julia Hubery Mary McQuillam, Wishmoley and the Little Piece of Sky
Children are ingenuous. They are also blessed with uncanny ability to read a person's character instantly. Even though they are inexperienced and unsophisticated, they often know instinctively who can be trusted and who is the charlatan.
— Wess Stafford, Too Small to Ignore: Why Children Are the Next Big Thing
Now I understand why women want to have children - it's simply the urge to create happiness for yourself, somehow to fill the oppressive, unbearable emptiness in your soul.
— Nina Lugovskaya, I Want To Live: The Diary of a Young Girl in Stalin's Russia
Someday all the children of the world will learn the truth about their noble inheritance. When that happens, a miracle will unfold on the kingdom of Earth.
— Charlene Costanzo, The Twelve Gifts of Birth
One of the greatest gifts we can give our children is the empowerment to create a life they love, filled with purposeful, enjoyable work, and relationships they hold dear.
— Sarah L. Cook, The Parents' Guide to Raising CEO Kids
Of course, I’ve told Jesus to suck it, too, which earned me a certain measure of notoriety, because you have to make fun of any religion that would let you have sixteen kids and say it’s God’s will.
— Kathy Griffin, Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin
Just know this: What you will do among children is as close to the heart of God and central to his kingdom as anything we could mention.
— Wess Stafford, Too Small to Ignore: Why Children Are the Next Big Thing
It all begins, I maintain, with that powerful and underutilized thing called love. God's love for the individual is displayed by those people who reflect his love in their words and deeds. It ultimately gets understood and accepted by the child in poverty, and through that individual's love for others, the world gets changed.
— Wess Stafford, Too Small to Ignore: Why Children Are the Next Big Thing
She had so many freckles that Erskine wondered if she might have stolen some from other children.
— Ned Beauman, Boxer, Beetle
I played with children so that I could learn from them.
— Shinichi Suzuki, Nurtured by Love: The Classic Approach to Talent Education
Hope had finally learned to live in the present. Often, when she found herself in a space of tremendous comfort, usually out in nature, or when her children were safe all around her and on the verge of going to bed, she forced herself to take stock. Here you are, Hope, she told herself. What a beautiful moment. You may never again be here at this spot, enjoying the calm. This habit of hers, to acknowledge the immediate and elusive joy of the present, kept her sane.
— David Bergen, The Age of Hope
One of pleasures of parenting, future reader: parent can positively influence kid, make moment kid will remember for rest of life, moment that alters his/her trajectory, opens up his/her heart + mind.
— George Saunders, Tenth of December
His house to me was a child was a heart of happiness. If there is a wonder childhood possesses which makes it forever superior to what shall come after, it is the happy and uncritical love of whatever is happy, place or person, it does not matter which.
— Elizabeth Spencer, This Crooked Way
the twelve royal gifts of birth belong to every child, born anywhere, at anytime" -
— Charlene Costanzo, The Twelve Gifts of Birth
I love children. Eating them, that is.
— Keith McGowan, The Witch's Guide to Cooking with Children
Every major movement in world history has recognized the strategic importance of mobilizing children. The Nazis had their Hitler Youth bands. The Chinese Communists had their Red Guards. The Taliban in Afghanistan had their madrash schools to instill extremism in the young. The great omission seems to be unique to Christians.
— Wess Stafford, Too Small to Ignore: Why Children Are the Next Big Thing
Sam, Sam, quite contrary,bought a budgie,wanted a canary.Sam, Sam, quite contrary, kissed Suzannah,meant to kiss Marry.Sam, Sam, quite contrary,dressed as a pirate,playing a fairy.Sam Sam quite contrary,ate dark chocolate,says he likes diary.Sam, Sam, quite contarary,shaved his head,to make it hairy.
— Chrissie Gittins, Now You See Me, Now You:  Poems
Philosophy has forgotten about children
— Bernhard Schlink
Even with my deepest soul I knew too well that all of these were just a stairs to heaven.
— Fernando Lachica, OFW: This is My Life and Story
You don’t look like anyone special at all,” I tell him. And I curse him. And I start a club to hate him. And I make a magic spell to get rid of him.
— Erica Lorraine Scheidt, Uses for Boys
Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.
— John Green, Paper Towns
Time passes. Even when it seems impossible. Even when each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise. It passes unevenly, in strange lurches and dragging lulls, but pass it does. Even for me.
— Stephenie Meyer, New Moon
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
— David Foster Wallace
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
The greatest enemy is one that has nothing to lose.
— Christopher Paolini, Eragon
But wishes are only granted in fairy tales.
— Simone Elkeles, Perfect Chemistry
Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
You know how sometimes you tell yourself that you have a choice, but really you don't have a choice? Just because there are alternatives doesn't mean they apply to you.
— Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave
And it's hard to hate someone once you understand them.
— Lucy Christopher, Stolen: A Letter to My Captor
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.
— Robert Jordan
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
— James Joyce, Ulysses
So...Mason, Eddie, and Mia went to Spokane to hunt Strigoi?""Yes.""Holy shit. Why didn't you go with them? Seems like something you'd do."I resisted the urge to smack him. "Because I'm not insane! But I'm going to go get them before they do something even stupider.
— Richelle Mead, Frostbite
I'm really not up for answering any questions that start with how, when, where, why or what.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory.You must remember this.
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
— David Foster Wallace
When will people learn that just because you can make something doesn’t mean you should?
— Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants
Maybe weakness is a strength of a kind.
— Melissa de la Cruz, The Van Alen Legacy
I've committed to nothing...and that's just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments.
— Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
Tally smiled. At least she was causing trouble to the end. "I'm Tally Youngblood," she said. "make me pretty.
— Scott Westerfeld, Uglies
Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That’s it. That’s my heart.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
C’est moi, c’est moi,’tis I,' I told him. It seemed appropriately melodramatic, though I didn’t know if he’d catch the reference. I shouldn’t have worried. Unexpectedly, he laughed. “Trust you to quote Lancelot rather than Guinevere.
— Patricia Briggs, Moon Called
While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.
— Michael Scott, The Warlock
Elena gasped back, "I can touch the ground!""I can see you touching it!", Bonnie exclaimed with tears of joy.
— L.J. Smith, Dark Reunion
Tatiana: "Why did we spend two days fighting when we could have been doing this?"Alexander: "That wasn't fighting, Tatiana. That was foreplay.
— Paullina Simons, The Bronze Horseman
Is where you're from the place you're leaving or where you have roots?
— Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants
You know I love you,' said the other mother flatly.'You have a very funny way of showing it,' said Coraline.
— Neil Gaiman, Coraline
But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
I am self-educated from genre books.
— Charlaine Harris
I was glad my father was an eye-smiler. It meant he never gave me a fake smile because it's impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren't feeling twinkly yourself. A mouth-smile is different. You can fake a mouth-smile any time you want, simply by moving your lips. I've also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it. So watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you but his eyes stay the same. It's sure to be a phony.
— Roald Dahl, Danny the Champion of the World
Patience is only a virtue when there is something worth waiting for.
— Lauren Willig, The Masque of the Black Tulip
No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
I try to be a good cop. I try to be a good little soldier and follow orders up to a point. But in the end I’m not really a cop, or a soldier. I am a legally sanctioned murderer. I am the Executioner.
— Laurell K. Hamilton, Skin Trade
We grew up learning to cheer on the underdog because we see ourselves in them.
— Shane L. Koyczan
everything happens for a reason.
— Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning
But a slow, deeply satisfied smile came over him, and his breath quickened. 'So softly it starts,' he whispered. 'Foolishly clever and with an unsurvivable trust. It just saved your miserable life, that questionable show of thought, my itchy-witch.' Al’s smile shifted, becoming lighter. 'And now you will live to possibly regret it.
— Kim Harrison, The Outlaw Demon Wails
Friendship isn't always sunnyside up.
— Jerry Spinelli
You wanted us all back together again!" Bonnie shouted at Caroline, and pulled the scandalized girl into the dance. Meredith, her dignity forgotten, joined them too.  And for a long time in the clearing there was only rejoicing.
— L.J. Smith, Dark Reunion
It touched me to be trusted with something terrible.
— Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!
— Ralph Ellison
You are there and to their ears, being a Syrian sounds like you’re unclean, shameful, indecent; it’s like you owe the world an apology for your very existence.
— Asaad Almohammad, An Ishmael of Syria
Ivy turned. 'He bit you on the neck?' she said, deadpan serious but for her eyes. 'Oh, then it's got to be love. She won't let me bite her neck.
— Kim Harrison, Dead Witch Walking
Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.
— Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
It was only when the giant got halfway down the incline that he suddenly, happily, burst into flame and continued his trip saying, "NO SURVIVORS, NO SURVIVORS!" in a manner that could only indicate deadly sincerity.It was seeing him happily burning and advancing that startled the Brute Squad to screaming. And once that happened, why, everybody panicked and ran...
— William Goldman, The Princess Bride
We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us - that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence - then we don't like it anymore.
— Stanisław Lem, Solaris
Annoyed?” said Sophie. “Why should I be annoyed? Someone only filled the castle with rotten aspic, and deafened everyone in Porthaven, and scared Calcifer to a cinder, and broke a few hundred hearts. Why should that annoy me?
— Diana Wynne Jones, Howl's Moving Castle
Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.
— Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots
...Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.
— Henry Jenkins
When feeling came back, in a storm of color and force and sensation, the most you could do was hold on to the person beside you and hope you could weather it. Alex closed her eyes and expected the worst-but it wasn't a bad thing; it was just a different thing. A messier one, more complicated one. She hesitated, and then she kissed Patrick back, willing to concede that you might have to lose control before you could find what you'd been missing.
— Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes
Love"I'm in love with you," he said quietly."Augustus,"I said."I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.""Augustus," I said again, not knowing what else to say. It felt like everything was rising up in me, like I was drowning in this weirdly painful joy, but I couldn't say it back. I couldn't say anything back. I just looked at him and let him look at me until he nodded, lips pursed, and turned away, placing the side of his head against the window.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
I have seen many cases like N. during the five years I've been in practice. I sometimes picture these unfortunates as men and women being pecked to death by predatory birds. The birds are invisible - at least until a psychiatrist who is good, or lucky, or both, sprays them with his version of Luminol and shines the right light on them - but they are nevertheless very real. The wonder is that so many OCDs manage to live productive lives, just the same. They work, they eat (often not enough or too much, it's true), they go to movies, they make love to their girlfriends and boyfriends, their wives and husbands . . . and all the time those birds are there, clinging to them and pecking away little bits of flesh.
— Stephen King, Just After Sunset
The blind faith in some half-assed conspiracy theories lines up with the logic of having to believe in something with no questions asked. It gives us peace and comfort. As simple as I was, I found that resorting to this absolute nonsense was the root of all our problems. It was a road of willingly-learned helplessness, for no action could make a difference, thereby no action was needed.
— Asaad Almohammad, An Ishmael of Syria
Can't say I've ever been too fond of beginnings, myself. Messy little things. Give me a good ending anytime. You know where you are with an ending.
— Neil Gaiman, The Kindly Ones
I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn't exist.
— Berkeley Breathed
General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.
— Marvin Minsky
We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.
— Orson Scott Card
Gods, I love this place," Locke said, drumming his fingers against his thighs. "Sometimes I think this whole city was put here simply because the gods must adore crime. Pickpockets rob the common folk, merchants rob anyone they can dupe, Capa Barsavi robs the robbers and the common folk, the lesser nobles rob nearly everyone, and Duke Nicovante occasionally runs off with his army and robs the shit out of Tal Verarr or Jerem, not to mention what he does to his own nobles and his common folk.
— Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora
A person with autism lives in his own world, while a person with Asperger's lives in our world, in a way of his own choosing
— Nicholas Sparks, Dear John
T.G.T.B.T: too good to be true.
— Madonna, Too Good to Be True
At the small table, sitting very upright, was one of the ugliest old ladies he had ever seen. It was an ugliness of distinction - it fascinated rather than repelled.
— Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express
When good Americans die, they go to Paris,' the ghost said, after taking a drag on a small cigarette.But you’re not dead. I suppose the question must be, are you good?
— Karen Chance, Embrace the Night
Are you looking for something real in this world of illusions? Call me. Casual Flings need not apply. I am looking for Love.
— Aprilynne Pike
I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Sometimes when you get older — and I’m not talking about you, I’m talking generally, because everyone ages differently — things you think on and wish on start to seem real. And then you believe them, and before you know it they’re part of your history, and if someone challenges you on them and says they’re not true — why, then you get offended because you can’t remember the first part. All you know is that you’ve been called a liar.
— Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants
No, it’s not fair, but what makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven. Earth is earth. Dead is dead. You’ll find out for yourself soon enough. It won’t help the situation for you to get all upset.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Damned
Every fiction has its base in fact.
— Gayle Forman, If I Stay
Truly, it is in loss that we learn a thing's true value.
— Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Avatar
...one had to expect very little—almost nothing—from life, Aaron knew, one had to be grateful, not always trying to seize the days like some maniac of living, but to give oneself up, be seized by the days, the months and years, be taken up in the froth of sun and moon, some pale and smoothie-ed river-cloud of life, a long, drawn-out, gray sort of enlightenment, so that when it was time to die, one did not scream swear words and knock things down, did not make a scene, but went easily with understanding and tact, and quietly, in a lightly pummeled way, having been consoled–having allowed to be consoled–by the soft, generous, worthlessness of it all, having allowed to be massaged by the daily beating of life, instead of just beaten.
— Tao Lin, Bed
How did you hear about that?''Are you kidding me? So far, I had that runt Kyle-''I hate him. I hate all vamps. That complete toad, Michael-''-tell me you were pregnant by a vamp-''kidnnaped me and-Kyle said WHAT?''and then a member of the Domi shows up and informs me-''The Domi sent someone HERE?''-that you're actually pregnant by the late king of the Fey.''Late?!' Heidar squeaked.
— Karen Chance, Midnight's Daughter
Infatuation burns itself out,' she says. 'Friendship mixed with old chemistry--that can last a lifetime.
— Tess Callahan
Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.
— James    Wood, How Fiction Works
The Countess was considerably younger than her husband. All of her clothes came from Paris (this was after Paris) and she had superb taste. (This was after taste too, but only just. And since it was such a new thing, and since the Countess was the only lady in all Florin to posses it, is it any wonder she was the leading hostess in the land?)
— William Goldman, The Princess Bride
Louis-Cesare slowly pulled himself into a half-standing position against the side of the winery.'What? Did you think one little mage was going to do me in?' He swallowed hard. 'Hell, that was just a warm-up.
— Karen Chance, Midnight's Daughter
I was trying to have an insight, and all I could think of was that I'd backed myself into a corner, and the corner was me.
— John Welter, Night of the Avenging Blowfish: A Novel of Covert Operations, Love, and Luncheon Meat
Love is implicit in every connection. It should be. Thus when absent it makes us insane. (You Shall Know Our Velocity)
— Dave Eggers
For however inhospitable the wind, from this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise - that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving.
— Amor Towles, Rules of Civility
To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.
— Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda
Jane woke, stretched, and decided to kill herself. If she hadn’t found a reason to live by the end of the day she would jump from the rig. It felt good to have a plan.
— Adam Baker, Outpost
I think fiction allows us to sit for a while with people we would rather not meet.
— Uwem Akpan, Say You're One of Them
The lights were off so that his heads could avoid looking at each other because neither of them was currently a particular engaging sight, nor had they been since he had made the error of looking into his soul.It had indeed been an error.It had been late one night-- of course.It had been a difficult day-- of course.There had been soulful music playing on the ship's sound system-- of course.And he had, of course, been slightly drunk.In other words, all the usual conditions that bring on a bout of soul searching had applied, but it had, nevertheless, clearly been an error.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
When you see a small change in your life it means its a huge change in personality and your trait
— Natasha Friend, Lush
But just then, for that fraction of time, it seems as though all things are possible. You can look across the limitations of your own life, and see that they are really nothing. In that moment when time stops, it is as though you know you could undertake any venture, complete it and come back to yourself, to find the world unchanged, and everything just as you left it a moment before. And it's as though knowing that everything is possible, suddenly nothing is necessary.
— Diana Gabaldon, Outlander
Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things.
— Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.
— John Gardner, Grendel
Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It’s an addiction to break.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Damned
In relationship there are always two types of person: one weaker and the other stronger one. It's never easier to live being as weaker one!
— Chetan Bhagat, Revolution 2020: Love, Corruption, Ambition
From a distance,' he says, 'my car looks just like every other car on the freeway, and Sarah Byrnes looks just like the rest of us. And if she's going to get help, she'll get it from herself or she'll get it from us. Let me tell you why I brought this up. Because the other day when I saw how hard it was for Mobe to go to the hospital to see her, I was embarrassed that I didn't know her better, that I ever laughed at one joke about her. I was embarrassed that I let some kid go to school with me for twelve years and turned my back on pain that must be unbearable. I was embarrassed that I haven't found a way to include her somehow the way Mobe has.'Jesus. I feel tears welling up, and I see them running down Ellerby's cheeks. Lemry better get a handle on this class before it turns into some kind of therapy group.So,' Lemry says quietly, 'your subject will be the juxtaposition of man and God in the universe?'Ellerby shakes his head. 'My subject will be shame.
— Chris Crutcher, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes
This book is so interesting. I always wonder what's going to happen next.
— Neal Shusterman, Everlost
Grimes believed in what he did, with no doubts. Though he was older than me by over a decade, I suddenly felt old. Some things mark your soul, not in years but in blood and pain and selling off parts of yourself to get the bad guys, until you finally look in the mirror and aren’t sure which side you’re on anymore. There comes a point when having a badge doesn’t make you the good guy, it just makes you one of the guys. I needed to be one of the good guys, or what the hell was I doing?
— Laurell K. Hamilton, Skin Trade
For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said.
— Virginia Woolf
The other raised his club and attacked L, who inexpliciably fell over on his back like an overturned frog.
— Tsugumi Ohba, Death Note: L, Change the World
Beckon The Sea,I'll Come To The....Shed Seven Tears, Perchance Seven Years....
— Terri Farley, Seven Tears Into the Sea
L shot Maki a disappointed look. But soon he forgot everything when Misa Amane appeared onstage. Enraptured he began to cheer with the girls in black lace and frilly skirts.
— Tsugumi Ohba, Death Note: L, Change the World
As I raced out of the office, I could hear Emily rapid-fire dialing four-digit extensions and all but screaming, 'She's on her way-- tell everyone.' It took me only three seconds to wind through the hallways and pass through the fashion department, but I had already heard panicked cries of 'Emily said she's on her way in' and 'Miranda's coming!' and a particularly blood curdling cry of 'She's baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!
— Lauren Weisberger, The Devil Wears Prada
You've a pretty good nerve," said Ratchett. "Will twenty thousand dollars tempt you?"It will not."If you're holding out for more, you won't get it. I know what a thing's worth to me."I, also M. Ratchett."What's wrong with my proposition?"Poirot rose. "If you will forgive me for being personal - I do not like your face, M. Ratchett," he said.
— Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express
Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.
— Herman Wouk
guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine
— Fay Weldon
All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?
— Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel
Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.
— Salman Rushdie
You know when I told you the joke about how a friend will help you move, but a real friend will help you move a body? I was only kidding.
— Brad Thor, Black List
In real life I do violence, but for psychic stuff I do other things better.
— Laurell K. Hamilton, Skin Trade
Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life
— Martin Amis, Essays
What happens when two introverts collide? Do they dissolve completely in each other’s patience and silence, or do they break their glass shells and become new people?
— Kanza Javed, Ashes, Wine and Dust
Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.
— Orson Scott Card
The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
— Vladimir Nabokov
They say that right before you die your whole life flashes before you – a medley of your own personal greatest hits. Well then, I must be about to live, because events that haven’t happened yet are constantly pushing themselves into my head.
— Emlyn Chand, Farsighted
All marriages have their bad sides, because people have weaknesses. If you live with another human being you learn to handle these weaknesses in a variety of ways. For instance, you might take the view that weaknesses are a bit like heavy pieces of furniture, and based on this you must learn to clean around them. To maintain the illusion.
— Fredrik Backman, Britt-Marie var här
Any capitalist . . . who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn't each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat. What I did you can do. Why don't you go and do it?
— Charles Dickens, Hard Times
Help me give up my addiction to Hope.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Damned
With the Black Company series Glen Cook single-handedly changed the face of fantasy—something a lot of people didn’t notice and maybe still don’t. He brought the story down to a human level, dispensing with the cliché archetypes of princes, kings, and evil sorcerers. Reading his stuff was like reading Vietnam War fiction on peyote.
— Steven Erikson
Oh,to be walking through Leningrad white night after white night, the dawn to dusk all smelting together like platinum ore, Tatiana thought, turning away to the wall, again to the wall, the wall, as ever. Alexander, my nights, my days, my every thought. You will fall away from me in just a while, won't you, and I'll be whole again, and I will go on and feel for someone else, the way everyone does. But my innocence is forever gone.
— Paullina Simons, The Bronze Horseman
Going for it and changing what you could change-that's what success was all about.
— Julie Garwood, Heartbreaker
We all have the best laid plans for our children, and they go and ruin it all by growing up any way they want to. What the hell was it all for, then? (Real Life and Liars)
— Kristina Riggle
Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.
— Douglas Adams
No offense, Jaron, but I don't want your life. Even locked away behind closed doors I got a taste for how awful it can be.""Did anyone try to kill you while I was gone?""No.""Then you didn't even get a taste.
— Jennifer A. Nielsen
Be careful who you choose as your friends because their bad habits can become your bad habits. Choose wisely...we all have a choice in life.
— Mimi Jenkins, I Am My Mother's Daughter
He was having more fun than a barrelful of monkeys.**Several years earlier Spider had actually been tremendously disappointed by a barrelful of monkeys. It had done nothing he had considered particularly entertaining, apart from emit interesting noises, and eventually, once the noises had stopped and the monkeys were no longer doing anything at all—except possibly on an organic level—had needed to be disposed of in the dead of night.
— Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys
It was a strange feeling, like touching a void.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
He judged the instant and let go
—  he flung himself loose into the stars.
I came, I saw, I concurred...
— Darren E. Laws, Turtle Island
...all I knew were novels. It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies.
— Rebecca Makkai, The Borrower
So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time. But when the pollen again gilded the sun and sifted down on the world she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, 'Ah hope you fall on soft ground,' because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.
— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
But now she could not bear the way she sounded. She was not a person anyone could love....And thus fled to her room. There she wept, bitterly, an ugly sound punctuated by great gulps. She could not stop herself. She could hear his footsteps in the passage outside. He walked up and down, up and down.'Come in,' she prayed. 'Oh dearest, do come in.'But he did not come in. He would not come in. This was the man she had practically contracted to give away her fortune to. He offered to marry her as a favour and then he would not even come into her room.Later, she could smell him make himself a sweet pancake for his lunch. She thought this a childish thing to eat, and selfish, too. If he were a gentleman he would now come to her room and save her from the prison her foolishness had made for her. He did not come. She heard him pacing in his room.
— Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda
When I first submerged my feet into frigid water, they hurt so badly I yanked them out again. I persisted, dunking them for longer and longer periods, until the cold finally blistered.
— Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants
In darkness there is death.
— Bob Mayer
Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together.
— Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be.
— Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
It doesn’t matter what other people think when you’re right - John Cleaver
— Dan Wells, I Am Not A Serial Killer
Last, but not least -- in fact, this is most important -- you need a happy ending. However, if you can create tragic situations and jerk a few tears before the happy ending, it will work much better.
— Satyajit Ray, The Bandits of Bombay
Writing a novel is agony.
— George Orwell
Sow a thought and reap an action, sow an action and reap a habit, sow a habit and reap a destiny - John Cleaver
— Dan Wells, I Am Not A Serial Killer
When you touch a man's body, he will enjoy the moment, when you touch a man's heart he will remember it forever.
— Dixie Waters
Happily ever after?" "If justice doesn't triumph and love doesn't make the circle in entertainment fiction, what's the point? Real life sucks too often.
— Nora Roberts, Angels Fall
The masses-I love em-they rush for red lights, risking everything to capture a few seconds, only to get home and waste their lives.
— Arthur Nersesian, Manhattan Loverboy
It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.
— Ann Patchett, State of Wonder
Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning.
— Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Ask any comedian, tennis player, chef. Timing is everything.
— Meg Rosoff, Just in Case
Honor is for the living. Dead is dead.
— Drew Karpyshyn, Path of Destruction
Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.
— Walker Percy
..and I thought how liking a boy was just the same as believing you wanted to know a secret - everything was better when you were denied and could feel tormented by curiousity or loneliness. But the moment of something happening was treacherous. It was just so tiring to have to worry about whether your face was peeling, or to have to laugh at stories that weren’t funny.
— Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep
We all love after-the-bomb stories. If we didn't, why would there be so many of them? There's something attractive about all those people being gone, about wandering in a depopulated world, scrounging cans of Campbell's pork and beans, defending one's family from marauders. But some secret part of us thinks it would be good to survive. All those other folks will die. That's what after-the-bomb stories are all about.
— John Varley
His fingers painted my skin with ruby red patterns of desire. In Keahi’s kiss I could taste the red burn of chili encrusted in the rich sweetness of melted chocolate. I breathed in his scent and it spoke to me of vanilla. The ink of my malu tattoo began to burn, searing markings of fiery joy.
— Lani Wendt Young, When Water Burns
We are all roamers of vast spaces and travelers in many ages.
— H.P. Lovecraft, Beyond the Wall of Sleep Complete Works
It was a time before Facebook and Instagram and texting. I imagine it must be easier now, for college students. Home must not feel so far away anymore. But how do you cut the apron strings if the strings are virtual?
— Kirstie Collins Brote, Beware of Love in Technicolor
And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.
— Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays
Perhaps we are all fictions, father, in the mind of God.
— Graham Greene, Monsignor Quixote
I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of the Perpetual Astonishment
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.
— Albert Camus
A smart person is not one that knows the answers, but one who knows where to find them...
— William Petersen, Underground
I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.
— E.M. Forster
The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.
— William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper.
— Michael Cox, The Meaning of Night
Few humans see fairies or hear their music, but many find fairy rings of dark grass, scattered with toadstools, left by their dancing feet.
— Judy Allen, Fantasy Encyclopedia
He has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket. It's like there's a film score playing behind him, heavy on the castanets. The problem comes in the hours when he isn't working, when his thoughts start blowing out the open window of his brain like pages from the blotter. Sometimes it takes a heavy paperweight to pin them down.
— Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes individual. How does the soul survive? is the essential question. And the response is: through love and imagination.
— Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
All literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction....Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving--amateurs--we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our own readers--should we be lucky enough to find any--some of the pleasure that we ourselves have taken in the stuff that we love: to get in on the game. All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.
— Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands
Kara knew all he recognized was T and A on a string and he was nothing more than a sleazy puppeeter , so long as there were souls for sale he was ready to buy ..
— Saira Viola, Crack Apple And Pop!
I know when my life is over my writings will live on, perhaps in a story or maybe a sweet love song. You see, I do not write for glory or to get anything for free. I just sit down and I write, because it makes so much sense to me.
— Terri F. Williams, Momma's Love
You'll have to learn to forgive," he said. "For if you don't, you know what will happen?""What, Doctor?" I croaked, for my outburst had exhausted me."It will destroy you," he said as he handed me the tea.A tear came into my eye when he said it for I knew it was true and I would have loved to be able to do it (not because of its destroying me but because it was right, and deep down I knew that) but I couldn't and the more I thought of it the more the blood came coursing to my head so that whenever I'd write I'd find myself clutching the pencil so tight I broke the lead how many times I don't know, hundreds.
— Patrick McCabe, Breakfast on Pluto
He says I'm beautiful as a red tomato
— Jeanne DuPrau, The City of Ember
As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper.
— Salman Rushdie
Valerik spit to one side. "We laugh at religion's brand of love, forms and rules that keep the poor feeding from the church's coffers. It is in deed." "I agree. That kind of love is porcelain-coated balls of dung.But what of true affection?...
— Ted Dekker, Immanuel's Veins
People say I talk slowly. I talk in a way sometimes called laconic. The phone rings, I answer, and people ask if they’ve woken me up. I lose my way in the middle of sentences, leaving people hanging for minutes. I have no control over it. I’ll be talking, and will be interested in what I’m saying, but then someone—I’m convinced this what happens—someone—and I wish I knew who, because I would have words for this person—for a short time, borrows my head. Like a battery is borrowed from a calculator to power a remote control, someone, always, is borrowing my head.
— Dave Eggers