Fiction Quotes

Mr. Codro's destiny is Ptolemaic; in other words, based on fiction. Ptolemaic says it all; it means above all fixed and unchanging, that is to say different from real life which is by nature changing and temporary. It means: not according to natural truth, but according to man's desire and the pretense inspired by his fear of dying and his desire for permanence.

~ Alberto Savinio

Someone was coming through the velvet.He was pulling it wide, he was stepping onto Kestrel’s balcony—close, closer still as she turned and the curtain swayed, then stopped. He pinned the velvet against frame. He held the sweep of it high, at the level of his gray eyes, which were silver in the shadows.He was here. He had come.Arin.

~ Marie Rutkoski

Some things are just like riding a bicycle; you jump on, pedal, and hope you don’t fall.

~ Henry Mosquera

People have incredible nerve to do terrible things, but never actually admit to them.

~ Henry Mosquera

This isn't the road home. This is a road littered with questions that will inevitably lead to an answer.

~ Meryl S. Kavanagh

Any self-defense class worth its salt will tell you thatyou don’t pull out a weapon unless you intend to use it.The same should apply to ballsy remarks.

~ Henry Mosquera

Some writers write to forget. Some forget to write.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

She might not have read many books. But when she reads a book, she swallows the very words. If you open the books on her shelves, you will find that the front and back covers encase white pages.

~ Kamand Kojouri

You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.

~ James Baldwin

It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word

~ William H. Gass

In fiction, the characters have their own lives. They may start as a gloss on the author’s life, but they move on from there. In poetry, especially confessional poetry but in other poetry as well, the poet is not writing characters so much as emotional truth wrapped in metaphor. Bam! Pow! A shot to the gut.

~ Jane Yolen

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

~ E.m. Forster

The Waves is an extraordinary achievement ... It is trembling on the edge. A little less - and it would lose its poetry. A little more - and it would be over into the abyss, and be dull and arty. It is her greatest book.

~ E.m. Forster

[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Poetry is a way of coming to know the realness of things, fiction is a way of coming to know the world of relationships, nonfiction is a way of coming to know the world of the mind.

~ Kelly Cherry

Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Plût au ciel que le lecteur, enhardi et devenu momentanément féroce comme ce qu’il lit, trouve, sans se désorienter, son chemin abrupt et sauvage, à travers les marécages désolés de ces pages sombres et pleines de poison ; car, à moins qu'il n’apporte dans sa lecture une logique rigoureuse et une tension d’esprit égale au moins à sa défiance, les émanations mortelles de ce livre imbiberont son âme comme l’eau le sucre. Il n’est pas bon que tout le monde lise les pages qui vont suivre ; quelques-uns seuls savoureront ce fruit amer sans danger. Par conséquent, âme timide, avant de pénétrer plus loin dans de pareilles landes inexplorées, dirige tes talons en arrière et non en avant. Écoute bien ce que je te dis : dirige tes talons en arrière et non en avant.

~ Comte De Lautréamont

And remember this most of all: when it is darkest, that is when you can see the stars most clearly.

~ Kathleen Mcgowan

To be honest with you, I don't have the words to make you feel better, but I do have the arms to give you a hug, ears to listen to whatever you want to talk about, and I have a heart; a heart that's aching to see you smile again.lines from Love Vs Destiny...

~ Atul Purohit

That the stars guide us, but do not compel us. It is our free will that determines the outcome of all things. God does impose his will on us, rather he makes it known and allows us to choose if we will follow it.

~ Kathleen Mcgowan

She fixed a smile that she hoped looked authentic. Pretending to be content continued to be hard work.

~ Stacy Hawkins Adams

The only sweeter than union is reunion.

~ Kathleen Mcgowan

The pure perfect truth of life is that we are here to create heaven on earth, to bring the perfection of what is above down to us, and in doing so to become transformed as human being into something great and beautiful.

~ Kathleen Mcgowan

Perhaps it is our obligation to be noble before it is our obligation to be happy.

~ Kathleen Mcgowan

The door wasn’t closing. Shiloh’s spirit opened up as she considered the possibilities.

~ Stacy Hawkins Adams

And whose rules will choose to you follow? God's? Or man's? You say you want to break the outmoded patterns and crate a new model? Then do it. That is part of your destiny, boy.

~ Kathleen Mcgowan

Show me a man that gets rich by being a politician, and I'll show you a crook.

~ Harry Truman

I always thought of the stars like a handful of gems that God randomly tossed across the sky, saying, 'Here, go wherever you please.

~ Chelsea Vanderbeek

It is when the individual's faith is weak, not strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life; and when there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the supernatural is apt gradually to be lost.

~ Flannery O'connor

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

~ Virginia Woolf

Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic, it is not for everybody, it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.

~ Flannery O'connor

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

~ E.m. Forster

A good book isn't written, it's rewritten.

~ Phyllis A. Whitney

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

~ Diane Setterfield

When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.

~ Charles Baxter

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.

~ Flannery O'connor

Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do― to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.

~ Stephen King

Fiction should be a place of lollipops and escape. Real life is depressing enough--I, for one, don't want to read about make believe misery, too.

~ Nicole Christie

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.

~ Iain M. Banks