Fiction Quotes

Ida tried not to sigh.“What do you think of your husband?” he asked.“He was rather short,” Ida said without thinking. When Aubrey didn’t respond, she thought that maybe she ought to elaborate and she said, “And beardy.”That was as much as she could remember of him in the midst of the chaotic events. He was short, bearded, quiet. But mostly short.“He used to be an officer,” Aubrey said.“So I have been told,” Ida tried, again, to keep the cheek from her voice though she was quite certain that she was failing.“In the Varangian army,” Aubrey continued.She resisted the urge to comment on how she didn’t care.

~ Carmen Dominique Taxer

Dmitri’s nerves calmed as he walked through the hedgerow maze, easily finding his way to the centre, sitting awhile.He had walked the grounds three times, before he finally went into the graveyard, looking for Sveta’s grave. It was easy to find. Easier since he had been to it every night since her passing. When he closed his eyes, he could still see her, strawberry hair blowing in the afternoon autumn wind, face flushed with laughter, eyes sparkling.She’d been a plain girl too. But she’d loved him.

~ Carmen Dominique Taxer

Skathis might have been an artist, but he'd been a vile one. Strange the dreamer was an artist, too, and he was the antidote to vile.

~ Laini Taylor

Max: Why do I get the feeling you’ve played god and you don’t know what you’ve created.Dr Hurstville: Hasn’t god done the same with us?

~ Jonathan K. Wade

But that's why you're upset now. Fiction is not life.''You don't believe that.''I think I do.''You know as well as I do that the line can't be drawn, that we're infected at every moment by fictions of all kinds, that it's inescapable.''Don't be a sophist,' he said. 'There is a world and it's palpable.''I don't mean that,' I said. 'I mean that it's hard really to see it, that it's all hazy with out dreams and fantasies.

~ Siri Hustvedt

You’re not interested in her because by your definition she isn’t real. But your brain doesn’t know the difference. It’s all just chemicals firing and testosterone giving you a hard-on.

~ Jonathan K. Wade

I have a hunch the world is darker than I could ever imagine and there is less reason for hope than I am able to see. It makes me grateful there is only so much I can see, and I am left mostly with questions. Grateful, also, that hope is not a reasonable thing. Though I have seen my share of darkness, I am spared perceiving much of it. And here is why I hope beyond a reasonable doubt: I think that as the darkness grows, it makes the dim lights that are left seem brighter. And the darker it gets, the brighter the light appears, until it is so luminous, eventually, even falling shadows are filled with it.

~ Brian K. Friesen

The sultan had enormous eyebrows, fibrous like angora wool. In moments of strife, his eyebrows twitched violently. Like now!His Excellency’s royal blood boiled. Once again another mesmerized American news anchor gushed about Dubai’s vision, hailing the imagination of the al-Maktoum family.“Where is this vision coming from?” probed Katie Couric.“Ignorant Yankee!” Sultan Mo-Mo’s British twang bore traces of Basil Fawlty.The sultan wanted to retch. Dubai’s showboating gave him indigestion, but he continued helping himself to more chips and fiery salsa, downing cold Guinness, smoking excellent hash, humming the theme song of The Wonder Years.

~ Deepak Unnikrishnan

But if I die without trying again, I'm a coward. I don't mind having regrets about stuff I've done. It's the regrets about stuff I haven't done that bother me.

~ Poppy Z. Brite

Ah, relationships. If he was lucky, Luke thought, he would never have another one.

~ Poppy Z. Brite

And what was I if not death's ghostwriter?

~ Poppy Z. Brite

Florence, listen to me carefully.... Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don’t ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. Then leave! Disappear. Forget this wretched place

~ Sana Krasikov

He didn't remember ever being less weird than he was right now. In fact, as far as he could tell he had always been more or less exactly as weird as this. if not more so.

~ Meg Rosoff

Sometimes in life you meet a femme fatale and you can refuse them nothing they treat you like dirt but even the dirt they dish out has a taste you can resist?From the novel 'Adventures of a Dark Duke: The Pin

~ Russell C. Brennan

Who is she, after all? Not a member of the Party. Not even a Russian...What can she do, really, but watch the ginger-haired sacrificial lamb get slaughtered? One wrong move and Florence herself might be on the chopping block herself

~ Sana Krasikov

If we're all aggressive, obedient solders [sic], who's going to write the poems and play the blues and go on anti-war protest marches?

~ Ken Follett

Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I’ll understand.

~ Gilbert C. Remillard

The immediate difficulty, Florence realised while riding the high rail back to Brooklyn, was how to break the news to her parents, even if she could convince them that being a chaperone to six foreign men was a legitimate occupation for a twenty-three-year-old girl. What choice did she have? A paycheck could not win a girl’s independence

~ Sana Krasikov

The ‘fact’ of my actions frequently collide with the ‘fiction’ of my words. And at what point will I live what I say, so I will avoid what I do?

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

There's what's smart and what's right. - Molly in the Night Gardener

~ Jonathan Auxier

How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from the psychiatrist’s couch or even the lovers’ bed. You see the soul, pinned and wriggling on the wall.

~ Martin Amis

It's a tough world to find yourself in, but an even tougher one to be yourself in

~ Chris Colfer

Human experience is not nest and orderly, ready to be coded into predetermined categories. Real life is messy

~ Jennifer Gold

Surely if Alternative Facts are untrue they should be called Ficts?

~ Alan Dapre

Why hadn't he chosen a different Amish barn to bed down in last nacht? He hated Bethany seeing him like this. Remembering him like this. A homeless wanderer. A stray.

~ Laura V. Hilton

Some travellers are apt to advance more than is perhaps strictly true; if any of the company entertain a doubt of my veracity, I shall only say to such, I pity their want of faith, and must request they will take leave before I begin the second part of my adventures, which are as strictly founded in fact as those I have already related.

~ Rudolph Erich Raspe

Idealistic world views should be our focus.

~ Sunday Adelaja

Memory is an artist, an impressionist. She adds colour, sound, smell and emotion to events at her whim. She adds, subtracts and embellishes until the event she started documenting is quite unrecognisable to the others who also experienced it, but at the same time, is more truthful to the owner of the memory. There is no reality. There are only impres- sions of past events, made by a million selves, all interacting with each other, vying for superiority. Reality doesn’t exist, perhaps in the end, that’s my only truth.

~ Nigel Jay Cooper

One thing an early-on writer has to learn, is to be comfortable with and responsive to critique. When five people in a group tell you this chapter sucks; don’t snap back at them with, “Sure, but it gets better in another 6 or 7 chapters!”Listen. – Thank them. – Consider.They can look from a fresh perspective, and catch things that you might be too close to see.But, you will also learn along the way that not everyone in a group of relative amateurs themselves, is going to catch everything, and there will be a few who seem to never understand much of anything.Some will always want paragraphs chopped down to explosive missiles of passion, while others are more used to long composite paragraphs that I myself find impossible to wade through.You may, once you have hit your full stride and power, feel comfortable telling a few of them, “Look. This isn’t a diner. I don’t take orders: ‘I’m gluten intolerant; he can’t do salt; she’s allergic to peanuts ...’“If what I offer is a salad bar, then No; I am not going to fry you up a cheesesteak!

~ Edward Fahey

I never said you had to like it. You have to accept it. No regret.-Clare Harding.

~ E.m. Benton

Human beings are born of blood, bound by gravity, eventually to perish... fallible by design... destined.

~ Neil Charles

Once upon a time,’ is code for ‘I’m lying to you.’ We experience stories as lies and truth at the same time. We learn to empathize with real people via made-up people. The most important thing that fiction does is it lets us look out through other eyes, and that teaches us empathy—that behind every pair of eyes is somebody like us.

~ Neil Gaiman

There are some wounds unreachable by words, some sins immune to apology.

~ Amy Hatvany

The girl I’d been just an hour ago was gone; she’d been obliterated. I had no idea who I was, now.

~ Amy Hatvany

...and as she stood on the Ashford platform waiting for the small train to come in, she seemed already separated from the people around her. Tomorrow I shall not be among you anymore; not of you but mysteriously still with you, thought Philippa. As Lady Abbess of Brede had said, People think we renounce the world. We don't. We renounce its ways but we are still very much in it and it is very much in us.

~ Rumer Godden

Great characters- They are pivotal for a great plot. THEN a solid plot: Why then? If you do not have great characters it is impossible to create a good plot, nonetheless a solid one. Once you have built great characters for the scenes, there you have it. It’s just like the movies, you cannot have a great film if the characters are frail and their lines are weak as well. I guess great world-building comes along with a good plot. If there is something that will work fine in a novel is how you will develop from the theme. You’ve got to establish a good timeline, and from there it comes a world. You see the technical matters don’t match or matter as much to me. Even a poorly written story, if there is a good plot and great characters on it will make a divine combination There are simply many cases of it over the mainstream and that even reached the big screen.

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

But life isn't neat the way a story is. And if you try to pretend it is, then you just make yourself unhappy, or screw yourself over.

~ Dexter Palmer

I felt numb, I felt empty. I was a shell, an abandoned chrysalis, a tomb lying in wait for the dead

~ Amy Hatvany

To embellish reality with makeup, with silk and royal purple, isn’t that what we all should be doing? Beneath the life we live every day the silk and the purple are hiding, waiting for us. A person just has to dare to throw off his everyday clothes, to rip them off and to put on the silk and purple that exist, I know it. But we’re the ones who cover them up. Out of boredom, indifference, fear. Mostly fear. So right from the first moment I met you, my lies were always the truth: in telling them I unveiled the world for you — the hidden world, the true world. You were really the one who lied. You wanted everything to remain untouched, paradise to be paradise, and me angel. But you made a fatal mistake: you never believed me. You never understood why I lied, that through my lies I was giving you a unique gift: the truth. You always tried to control me — out of love, of course. But is there any word more ambiguous than the word “love”?

~ Margarita Karapanou

Many politicians are tantalizing storytellers, as they mix facts with fiction, grab our emotion and tell things, they want us to believe. Their factoids are unremittingly reiterated, take a life on their own and in the end become the very truth… until the bubble bursts.(What after bowling alone? )

~ Erik Pevernagie