Fiction Quotes

Fiction inhabits the zone between the real and the impossible. The tug of those two poles is what gives it motion, vitality. Tethering fiction too tightly to the real produces plodding, lifeless stories. Letting it float too far from that anchor produces stories that are arbitrary and unpersuasive.

~ Vinnie Tesla

It hurts,” Summer cries, head shaking back and forth. “Please, make it stop.” Sweat beads on her forehead.“What hurts?” Cameron asks.“My eyes.”Summer’s eyes open. Everyone gasps. They’re no longer blue; they appear bionic, like a circuit board’s inside her eyes. Panicked now, Summer reaches for her face. “What is it? What’s wrong?

~ Laura Kreitzer

Beneath Albright’s office, the colliery sprawled across the hillside, red brick buildings scattered as though hurled from a great height, a hotchpotch of mismatched structures spattered on the valley floor. At the bottom stood the winding house, wheels motionless, above it, the engineering sheds and workshops, canteen and bath house. All lay empty. No buzz and hum of machinery. No voices raised in laughter or dispute. Gwyn found it unsettling: his lads had been out a month and a half and already the power had drained from the place. In the stillness, he caught the echo of footsteps. The crunch of boots on gravel. Generations of long-gone Pritchards clocking in and out. He was bound to Blackthorn by the coal that clogged his veins and by a bond of duty. The strike left him as diminished as his pit, day dragging after idle day.

~ Kit Habianic

You two are bound to one another. You always have been … and you can't run away from what you are. No matter where you go, your feelings for her are going to follow you.

~ Mirella Muffarotto

Laughter comes from living. I shrug, try to sound indifferent. I've never really been alive before.

~ Tahereh Mafi

On the misty window of her room, she let her finger trace a broken line. She was that line.

~ Azin Sametipour

but in Utopia, where every man has a right to everything, they all know that if care is taken to keep the public stores full no private man can want anything; for among them there is no unequal distribution, so that no man is poor, none in necessity, and though no man has anything, yet they are all rich; for what can make a man so rich as to lead a serene and cheerful life, free from anxieties; neither apprehending want himself, nor vexed with the endless complaints of his wife?

~ Thomas More

His smile is beautiful. It's the kind of smile that can take away all nervousness and tension in a room, no matter how big. I have no choice but to smile back.

~ S. Elle Cameron

Truth in her dress finds facts too tight. In fiction she moves with ease.

~ Rabindranath Tagore

Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world.

~ G.k. Chesterton

The education of youth belongs to the priests, yet they do not take so much care of instructing them in letters, as in forming their minds and manners aright; they use all possible methods to infuse, very early, into the tender and flexible minds of children, such opinions as are both good in themselves and will be useful to their country, for when deep impressions of these things are made at that age, they follow men through the whole course of their lives, and conduce much to preserve the peace of the government, which suffers by nothing more than by vices that rise out of ill opinions.

~ Thomas More

For me, stories are like WD-40 for the brain: they keep all the wheels and gears and clicky-things running smoothly. Without them, cognitive function becomes a bore.

~ The Inkslinger

To believers, the bible is a holy book, to unbelievers, it is a story book.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

...Life had handed me a different set of cards and I was going to have to play my hand either way.

~ Brittany Hawes

I knew that feeling, the sense of panic that stretched time, turning seconds into years, and the deep pain that came from being hurt by not one person but many, a gang of bullies that expanded into a neighborhood and then into a community, until you questioned the whole world. And your last thought, as you stretch your arm until your fingers are inches from that lifeline, is how if you survive, you'll find a way to help fix what was broken, so you can say that yes, you want to be part of the world again.

~ Lissa Price

…progress isn't necessarily about change but about things turning out as we want them to

~ Phil Hogan

When you least expect it, you run in to an old friend from school, or the neighbour’s cat, not Mary the Virgin Mother of God.

~ Margot Mccuaig

It should be said that my parents had married for love. The affection and devotion they had shared was the rarest of indulgences, perhaps especially in those days. For them, it had been love at first sight, and so my mother's death shattered my father. That it only dimmed his light rather than snuffed it out altogether was a miracle in and of itself. ~The Peacemakers ~(The Nemesis Engines)

~ Olivier A. Blanchard

but in Utopia, where every man has a right to everything, they all know that if care is taken to keep the public stores full no private man can want anything; for among them there is no unequal distribution, so that no man is poor, none in necessity, and though no man has anything, yet they are all rich; for what can make a man so rich as to lead a serene and chreerful life, free from anxieties; neither apprehending want himself, nor vexed with the endless complaints of his wife?

~ Thomas More

Why did you leave? Am I not good enough? Where did you go? When did it happen? ..Who are you?

~ Ade Santi

Lucy: I don't feel like talking about college. It increases my stress level.James: And increased stress levels lead to hair loss.Lucy: My head-hair volume is fine.James: You say that like I should be concerned about leg-hair volume.

~ Kristen Tracy

Anyone who met him today would say, *Soldier. Fighter.* They would want him on their team. As a mother she was willing to engage in pride over fear and to admit the possibility that his sacrifice was hers, too. His sacrifice was something she had been able to give her country.

~ Lea Carpenter

I wasn't writing home. I wasn't writing a death letter, either. I was writing a death journal, a piece of fiction meant for my family and my fiancee, Sara.

~ Clint Van Winkle

It's just like an alcoholic to think he's doing the Zombie Apocalypse wrong.

~ Michele W. Miller

Creativity is a commodity and derives its value only in how energy is spent.

~ Mary Deal

For now the world keeps turning and I keep breathing, in and out, in and out. I breathe in the life that is all around me, in this garden, in this city, in the fields beyond it, in the seas beyond them and the shores on the other side; life that reaches out towards the unreachable, unknowable space that is beyond all of us and the stars that burn there.

~ Clare Furniss

It's better to lose some of battles in the struggle for your dreams than to be defeated without ever even knowing what you're fighting for.

~ Paulo Coelho

Under fun’s new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don’t want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or to present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable. This process is complicated and confusing and scary, and also hard work, but it turns out to be the best fun there is.The fact that you can now sustain the fun of writing only by confronting the very same unfun parts of yourself you’d first used writing to avoid or disguise is another paradox, but this one isn’t any kind of bind at all. What it is is a gift, a kind of miracle, and compared to it the reward of strangers’ affection is as dust, lint.

~ David Foster Wallace

I can be a woman on a mission. But I'll choose what mission that is. And that my friend is where youll see the results.

~ Kia Carrington-Russell

As I pen these words to leave a lasting record, I wonder myself where it all began.

~ Richard Peck

Everyday, God gives us the sun- and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes us unhappy. Everyday, we try to pretend that we haven't perceived that moment, that it doesn't exist - that today is the sames as tomorrow. But if people really pay attention to their everyday lives, they will discover that magic moment.

~ Paulo Coelho

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold.

~ George Orwell

All the clues are there in front of us,hidden under a veil,we cannot get the clue by searching for,we have to search for the veil instead.

~ Arkopaul Das

Remember that human wisdom is madness in the eyes of God. But if we listen to the child who lives in our soul, our eyes will grow bright.

~ Paulo Coelho

Unintended jealousy is merciless.

~ Doctor Kesi

To give herself a measure of credible autonomy, she had decided to invent a husband. Then, in a subsequent flash of inspiration, she had just as quickly killed him off.

~ Tracy Anne Warren

Historical fiction of course is particularly research-heavy. The details of everyday life are there to trip you up. Things that we take for granted, indeed, hardly think about, can lead to tremendous mistakes.

~ Sara Sheridan

Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.

~ Sara Sheridan

She stared at the faded tile floor before her feet, but knew his every step around her small kitchen. When Martin touched the coffee cup patterned curtains he must assume she’d made, her fingers throbbed. When his eyes slid across the flowery aluminum water bottle at the table, her throat cracked with thirst.The radio clicked off.The silence of the room soaked up her raspy breaths, her pounding heart, her ache, and stirred them around the one man she ever longed for in a way that changes how you taste the world.Her desire swirled in a pulsing, betraying, blurry hook, and encouraged him to move closer.Martin obeyed.

~ Kim Bongiorno

If everything comes in your way just the way you wanted them to ,then you're probably in the wrong lane.

~ Arkopaul