Fiction Quotes

The details of what we call our lives go sometimes to form patterns of meaning not unlike those to be found in our preferred sort of fiction.

~ Gerald Murnane

Love is the connection between souls synchronized through heart beats. Quote from my upcoming book 'Always Be MINE

~ Neha Daraad

As the wind continued to howl and groan through her decaying body, she began to sing her story.

~ Ken Liu

The long rays of sun stretched across the street and touched the twisted mabati tin roofs of the shops, creating a soft light that dulled the dust and rust, making them look almost beautiful.

~ Stanley Gazemba (Bahati Books)

great literature is literature that speaks to deep, fundamental human truths and experience in a way that is relatable to the reader and that may provoke engagement or facilitate insight into these truths and experiences. If these truths and experiences are about breaches of the normal, then surely horror has a place in literature, and in facts may proffer deep engagement with the most profound aspects of our existence. Sometimes only horror can say what needs to be said.

~ Jacob M. Held

In any random slaughter, the difference between living and dying rarely has anything to do with willpower, or wisdom, or pluck. It's just a matter of where you're standing. Two inches to the right, and the bus hits you. If your office is on the ninety-second floor instead of the ninetieth, you don't make it out in time.

~ Joe Hill

Well, they've come a long way. To think that he now could access a secret document held in the Vatican archives, via electronic technology.

~ Peter J. Tanous

Pak Karman hugged his wife’s gravestone tightly. “You left without saying farewell!” The whole of the graveyard was ablaze with light.

~ Mohamed Latiff Mohamed

They will try to ascribe a purpose to my death, as though it were a punishment, but don’t you do so, in order that I continue to live in all the shadows of your longing. I will always be in your sleep and your wakefulness. I will be with you praying, propitiating and yearning for you, in sadness, in sorrow, in dismay and in the most profound happiness.

~ Mohamed Latiff Mohamed

I think, therefore I am. My fingers that caress these rose and frangipani petals are a result of my thoughts. I feel content, tender. I feel entranced, ecstatic and besotted by the fragrance of the flowers and this is because of my thoughts.

~ Mohamed Latiff Mohamed

Rebecca woke up with her knees hurting and her fingers ice-cold, and the specifics of her life returned to her as the dream disappeared: weekend, hotel room, Baguio, memory, memory, memory.

~ Eliza Victoria

To understand what's happening in the U.S. presidential election of 2016, you need to know what's going on in the year 2024! Soundscape: Where hearing is believing.

~ Royce Flippin

But we will not bury our mother. We have no interest in putting her bones in soft ground, no desire for memorials and platitudes, no feelings attached to the organic detritus of her terminated existence.

~ J.y. Yang

I don't put much stock in remembering things. Being able to forget is a superior skill.

~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

What is the nature of life?Life is lines of dominoes falling.One thing leads to another, and then another, just like you'd planned. But suddenly a Domino gets skewed, events change direction, people dig in their heels, and you're faced with a situation that you didn't see coming, you who thought you were so clever.

~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, our lives. Is that why we're fascinated by the steadfastness of stars? The water reaches my calves. I begin the story of the Pleiades, women transformed into birds so Swift and bright that no man could snare them.

~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Treat backstory like a pungent spice. I say this to encourage you to picture a jalapeno pepper that can set your mouth on fire, every time you even think about adding backstory into your book. What you need is subtlety.

~ Sandy Vaile

Any moment now, I thought, he was going to wake up. Any moment.

~ O Thiam Chin

She lifts her eyes, and there is Death in the corner, but not like a king with his iron crown, as the epics claimed. Why, it is a giant brush loaded with white paint. It descends upon her with gentle suddenness, obliterating the shape of the world.

~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

But inside loss there can be gain, too,like the small silver spider Bela had discovered one dewy morning, curled asleep at the center of a rose.

~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Backstory is like a flavour you can’t quite pick, lurking in the layers of a curry. You know it’s there and it enhances the flavour, but it’s intangible and fleeting. Use it sparingly!

~ Sandy Vaile

Delayed gratification hints that something terrible is going to happen, and then delays the resolution. It’s that interval between the promise of something awful and it actually happening, where suspense resides.

~ Sandy Vaile

Suspense doesn’t always have to be about physical danger. Making the reader worry is a universal concept that can be applied to any story.

~ Sandy Vaile

I’m unhappy doing just mole stuff. What’s wrong with me? Why couldn’t I look forward to digging my own burrow?

~ Mary T. Kincaid

She looked at me like I was stupid, the same look the girls in JC used to give me when I hadn’t heard of the latest boy band, or turned up at Zouk wearing unfashionable clothes.

~ Jeremy Tiang

Lim Oh Kee kills himself in the early hours on the 12th day of December, 1921. His last meal is rice and nothing.

~ Evan Adam Ang

Sometimes just getting through each day requires almost superhuman strength.

~ Jojo Moyes

She wasn't just a B-girl, she was carrying the whole ugly world in her eyes.

~ Megan Abbott

They watch her when she comes to City Hall, they watch her at the social events, they watch the way she walks, hips rolling with no suggestion of provocation but with every sense that she knows more than any of the rest. A woman like that, they seem to be thinking, a woman like that has lived.Their wives from Orange County, they come from Minnesota or Dallas or St.Louis. They come from places with families, with sagging mothers and fathers with dead eyes and heavy-hanging brows. They carry their own promise of future slackness and clipped lips and demands. They have sisters, sisther with more babies, babies with sweet saliva hanging and more appliance and with husbands with better salaries and two cars and club membership. They iron in housedresses in front of the television set or by the radio, steam rising, matting their faces, as the children with the damp necks cling on them, sticky-handed. They are this. And Alice… and Alice…

~ Megan Abbott

The child came to a stop beside her mother and stared up at her face as if she had never seen it before. It was the face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to Powell himself. The child turned her head quickly, and past the Negroe's ambling figures she could see the column of smoke rising and widening unchecked inside the granite line of trees. She stood taut, listening, and could just catch in the distance a few wild high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them.

~ Flannery O'connor

…My eyes were wet, tears waiting to drop from my eyes and heart started to sob. The words from Jiya pushed me on my back foot…”Source: 'The Unpredictable Heart - You may be a Victim

~ Moksh

Life’s unpredictable patterns had a strange way of forming a connected web.

~ D.a. Pupa

What if happiness was a choice?

~ Sunanda J. Chatterjee

He was not a likeable figure but then when you are a part of a family, you cannot wish to see someone wither away even when you dislike him. He is a part of your blood, he and all his idiosyncrasies. There is always a tinge of warmth in the corner of your heart, reminiscent of the good times spent together. Then there are always those moments, when you wonder why everything turned out so different. When you wonder what possibly could hold people together, if not the fact that they come from the same blood? Or are we just not born to be that way? Craving to be something that we cannot be, each with our own false ceilings to hide our true selves?

~ Amit Sharma

People are complicated. And messy. Seems too convenient that we’d all fit inside some multiple-choice question.

~ Riley Cavanaugh

I found myself thinking that perhaps there was something inexorable about the way events unfolded, as if my life--which had begun to seem something not my own but rather something into which I found myself blindly toppling--was indeed something living, that existed without my knowledge but that pulled me along in its strong, insistent undertow.

~ Hanya Yanagihara

In the library of the observatory in Ondrejov, above Prague, I once found a catalogue of stars that astounded me. It had hundreds of pages with tables of stars that had been observed and confirmed to exist. Towards the end there was a table of stars thought to have been observed but confirmed to not exist. But to my astonishment, at the back of the volume I found a list of stars which had never been observed and did not exist. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the universe is that we could create an infinite catalogue of things, worlds and beings that no one has seen and which do not exist. Each story in the realm of fiction is a small part of that catalogue.

~ Peter Nilson

Fiction is an ancient virtual reality technology that specializes in simulating human problems.

~ Jonathan Gottschall

When the world uncovers some dark disguise,Embrace the darkness with averted eyes.

~ Thomas Ligotti

Forsake the world and cling to the shadows.

~ Thomas Ligotti