Fiction Quotes

Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us.

~ Arundhati Roy

Outbreaks of unvarnished truths in the backyard of our true self can be very precious and inspiring, even though we might inconsistently be tempted to give in to the exhilarating perfume of fables and fairy tales or to flattering praise and fiction. (The day the mirror was talking back)

~ Erik Pevernagie

Even in the most uneventful of our lives, we are called upon to choose our battles...

~ Arundhati Roy

Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence. It is our constant anxiety about that violence, our memory of its past labours and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and as diverse as we continue to coexist – continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another. As long as the centre holds, as long as the yolk doesn’t run, we’ll be fine. In moments of crisis it helps to take the long view.

~ Arundhati Roy

...something more than the sum of its parts-

~ Victoria Schwab

I was an utterance in absentia. I was a forgotten word, uttered and mislaid long ago. I was the word that existed because there was another word that was my opposite, and without it I was nothing. I gained meaning only by acknowledging that possible other.Nida

~ Faiqa Mansab

To become an effective radiation researcher, you must develop the ability to discern fact from fiction.

~ Steven Magee

The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.

~ Siri Hustvedt

What you do today is important . We can never get today back.

~ Christine Handy

I am afraid I am going to drift into fiction, truthful but incomplete, for lack of some details which I cannot conjure up today and which might have enlightened us. This morning, the idea of the egg came again to my mind and I thought that I could use it as a crystal to look at Madrid in those days of July and August 1940—for why should it not enclose my own experiences as well as the past and future history of the Universe? The egg is the macrocosm and the microcosm, the dividing line between the Big and the Small which makes it impossible to see the whole. To possess a telescope without its other essential half—the microscope—seems to me a symbol of the darkest incomprehension. The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.

~ Leonora Carrington

The Tanzanian told her that all fiction was therapy, some sort of therapy, no matter what anybody said.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Still the Amaltas bloomed, a brilliant, defiant yellow. Each blazing summer it reached up and whispered to the hot brown sky, Fuck You.

~ Arundhati Roy

It is not often that I have two options to choose from. It is nice to be compelled towards something, otherwise one drifts through life unimpeded.Bhanggi

~ Faiqa Mansab

I had never said those words because there were no words left. My beloved and I were both exiles from language. Our love couldn't be expressed in words. Our love had been woven into the melodies rendered by his flute, and it was subsumed in the atoms of the air we breathed. It had been consecrated in this shrine. It had never been named. It was an unnamed thing that had remained unspoken, unuttered, unsaid. I did not need to name it when he could already hear it.

~ Faiqa Mansab

You look like shit.” “Thanks. I look way better than I feel.

~ J.t. Lawrence

What do you think about America?Everyone always smiles so big! Well—most people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid.

~ Donna Tartt

An important feature of good characterization in a novel is that the characters are dimensionalized and are not all of one piece. Human beings, as Singer noted, have contradictions.

~ Joseph Telushkin

The address given to me by Greta was written in such a way that the words looked like numbers, and the numbers looked like the aftermath of a startled octopus meeting a deep-sea diver in a corner café. It was the worst writing I had ever seen.

~ Shoeburn Ruffet

Mrs.Pontellier was not a woman given to confidences, a chararacteristic hitherto contrary to her nature. Even as a child she had lived her own small life all within herself. At a very early period she had aprehended instinctively the dual life, that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.

~ Kate Chopin

Emotions tend to entwine Earthlings together.

~ Ruchira Khanna

It is amazing how sharing of one’s intimate details can make human beings forget the formality of a relationship and bring them closer together.

~ Ruchira Khanna

I wanted to be something else, anything else. I could be a snail on a leaf, or the leaf itself. I could be a pig in the mud or a cow grazing in the field. I could be a drop of rain that fell from the heavens, or a shimmering fish deep in the ocean. But I was human and I had feelings

~ Burbuqe Raufi

She knew this day was different and worse, much worse than before. This was the day that Bethany began to believe their lies. And not only did she believe them, she silently repeated them, causing more damage to her soul and spirit than anyone else on earth could have ever done to her.

~ Katie Hubbard

It had seemed to me an elegant nightmare concoction made by adults for adults, to further the aims and fantasies of adults, and what have children to do with such things?

~ Joyce Carol Oates

A few of the gunslingers dance, but only a few. And they were the young ones. The other ones only sat, and it seemed to me they were half embarrassed in all that light, that civilized light.

~ Stephen King

My thoughts are free to go anywhere,but its suprising how often they head in your direction

~ Juvy Ann

The best love is the one that makes you a better person, without changing you into someone other than yourself

~ Juvy Ann

Everyone says you only fall in love once, but that not true, because every time I see you, I fall in love all over again

~ Juvy Ann

He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

Isn't there some truth in all fiction? There's some fiction in all truth too.

~ Catherine Lowell

Remember this one thing baby girl, women don’t juggle…we diversify!

~ Iesha S. Walker

She was disappointed in herself for being the typical girl. She never wants to be that girl. That girl…is an emotional wreck. That girl…was an excuse for men who cheat and lose respect for women. That girl…is weak and needy. Troy was better than That Girl! Troy was stronger than That Girl.

~ Iesha S. Walker

As Dorothy J. Heydt famously said, the eight deadliest words for any work of fiction are 'I don't care what happens to these people.

~ Charlie Jane Anders

The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend.

~ Haruki Murakami

Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.

~ Harper Lee

Whatever binds us, ripples through us all. We might not all be shadow, but we are all human. I remind myself every night. I am a man. I always will be.And I will always, fiercely, defend my loves, to the very end.Let it come.

~ Carmen Dominique Taxer

She reached forward and lifted her uncle up into her arms. He was still too weak to resist, and she comforted him with a stroke of her fingers through his greying hair, softly kissing his lips, tasting the blood with a shiver of anticipation, and moving her kisses to his cheek, the line of his jaw, the crook of his neck where his pulse thundered to push the shadowy blood to its destinations.“Know that, when I do this, I’m doing it, to ease your suffering,” she whispered, lips pressed to his skin, her fangs pressing behind them hungrily.

~ Carmen Dominique Taxer

I know what you’re doing,” he whispered to Raphael, whose movements only became more fervent, and the thought slipped from the boy’s mind so that he became dazed and undone with pleasure, staring up at the ceiling, watching as it blurred and became indistinct, and he felt the rising rush of pleasure, until he cried out in a sharp gasp.And the pleasure went on and on, as it did, unbearably, until either Raphael took pity on him, or he pushed his Genitor away. Whichever it was, the pleasure that was leaking into pain, stopped, and he was lifted and laid down on the stone, cold and hard under his spine, and Raphael was bent over him, kissing up this time, up to his lips, flicking his tongue at them, and whispering: “Don’t question my love for you. Ever again.

~ Carmen Dominique Taxer

We blended and look to what it has brought us.I planted lilies on your grave. The rain is already splattering them with dripping dew.May they last another hundred years, Gerard.A hundred years of lilies.

~ Carmen Dominique Taxer

Father and the child were no longer speaking, but they sat together in silence. The child was at his feet, and he sat, up in his throne, his eyes on the sky as well.It made her smile. They existed beneath the same stretch of stars. They loved the same night blanket above them.She looked at him, taking the opportunity to relish in his distraction to study him, his midnight hair, his pale body, only barely covered by the cloak, the fur of it distractingly like his hair, his lips just parted enough that his fangs were visible, his deep violet eyes, his long, elegant fingers, stroking the…She swallowed back pain that rose up her throat as she watched Father stroking the boy’s hair. Sitting together like that, the similarities between them were bewitching. She frowned, glancing once, disdainfully at the wavy-haired child with the slanted green eyes, walking to her Father’s throne and bending her knee in a bow.There was a sound like a chuckle, and she looked up at him. He was smiling at her. It warmed the quiet cold in her chest.“Come,” he said in his sonorous voice, and the darkness whispered with it, a thousand voices in varying degrees of age, gender, depth and lifted sweetness, all speaking together. She moved closer to him, sitting where his arm wound around her shoulder, fitting them together like childish toy blocks.

~ Carmen Dominique Taxer