Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Novelists
Explore popular quotes by famous novelists.
Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.
It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
I don't know that love changes. People change. Circumstances change.
We're all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.
Maybe it's because I'm a little naive, but I do like to think that there aren't really very many truly bad people in the world. I think that everybody has their reasons for what they do, and if you really look through their eyes, you could probably understand them.
I'm always hopeful. I feel like I'm at the prom sitting against the wall waiting for someone to ask me to dance.
There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.
Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories.
There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
If you actually succeed in creating a utopia, you've created a world without conflict, in which everything is perfect. And if there's no conflict, there are no stories worth telling - or reading!
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.
There is no such thing as perfect security, only varying levels of insecurity.
I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.
Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, craving and identity.
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.
To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell's heart, I stab at thee; For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee.
Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
The only journey is the one within.
Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
Some things are destined to be -- it just takes us a couple of tries to get there.
When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
Solitude is independence.
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.
To be prepared is half the victory.
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.
She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
If you don't risk anything, you risk even more.
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
Everyone is an ocean inside. Every individual walking the street. Everyone is a universe of thoughts, and insights, and feelings. But every person is crippled in his or her own way by our inability to truly present ourselves to the world.
The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow firm there, firm as weeds among stones.
Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
Whoever said money can't buy happiness simply didn't know where to go shopping.
Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.
I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.
Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.
People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.
Life is a journey that must be traveled no matter how bad the roads and accommodations.
If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.
