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Novels Quotes

Browse 286 quotes about Novels.

Novels Quotes

“I'm not sure that my friend's father liked my book. In an attempt to save me from my own imagination, he wrote me a six-page letter pointing out all the physical impossibilities and imaginary rules I had come up with to be able to say whatever the book says. The letter proves that the true art is reading, not writing, and it is a beautiful testament of loyalty: a friend of his son's is a friend of his. Commenting on some sexual incidents described in the novel, he noted: Now I know why you and my son are friends." This is a statement of complicity. It tells me that if we knew each other, he would forgive my defects just as he does his son's.”

WritingReadingNovels
Book:Sudden Death
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“Together they read plays and poems by William Shakespeare and Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, and Bianca translated some of Ovid's poetry for her as well as parts of Homer's great works. They relished the poems of Andrew Marvell, John Dryden and John Milton. They read excerpts from the King James Bible, as well as passages from books of history, gardening, medicine and more. The closet wasn't much, but it was Rosamund's, especially now it bore no resemblance to its former owner. It was her cave in which, like Ali Baba, she kept her trove of treasured ideas and growing knowledge, but could open and close it at will with the key hanging around her neck. It was in this room that Rosamund finally started to feel a sense of belonging.”

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Book:The Chocolate Maker's Wife
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“Cardan had his polished boots resting on a rock and his head pillowed on the utterly ridiculous mortal book he'd been reading. Since the one with the girl and the rabbit and the bad queen, he'd discovered he had a taste for human novels. A hob in the market traded them to Cardan for roses smuggled out of the royal gardens.”

ReaderCuteHolly BlackThe Folk Of The AirCardan GreenbriarCardanNovelsAlice In WonderlandHuman Novels
Book:How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories
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“[Patricia Highsmith] was a figure of contradictions: a lesbian who didn't particularly like women; a writer of the most insightful psychological novels who, at times, appeared bored by people; a misanthrope with a gentle, sweet nature.”

PeopleWritingWomenNatureSweetInsightPsychologicalBoredGentleWriterInsightfulLesbianNovelsLikeMisanthropeContradictions
Book:Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι
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“Privately I've always considered myself to have some talent for measuring a woman's mood. But the expression on (her) face is forcing me to reconsider. Not blank, but the opposite. Regret coexisting with pride, with hints of resentment, joy, frustration, shame, resignation, and curiosity. When it comes to emotions, women know how to paint with the full set of oils, while men are busy doodling with crayons”

RomanceLiteratureFictionHumourHumorousContemporaryLiterary FictionAmerican CultureNovelsAmerican
Book:God Hates Us All
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“Sometimes I trick myself when writing in my notebook; sometimes I end up working on the novel after all, in those pages. And that is the best reason to return to it, that it brings me closer to something I haven't otherwise been able to get to, or that can't get to me. I want to go further into my writing, into my thinking. 'And do I?”

ThinkingWritingThoughtWriting ProcessNovelsTaking Notes
Book:A Horse at Night: On Writing
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“The magic in writing is not so much using your imagination as it is allowing the reader to uses theirs. When I write a novel I’m not going to hand walk you through each scene. Avid readers tend to have very high IQ’s so I’m constantly aware of, and respect that. I have a tendency to give my readers vivid descriptions of panoramic viewpoints, soft breezes, and the late evening as it scrapes against the emerging night and present this step by suspenseful step. Once I get them to the threshold of that unseen cliff, I shove them off and say, take it from there.”

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Book:Darkness Left Undone
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“Taut, intelligent, and intense suspense that is deeply human.”—Mark Greaney, New York Times Bestselling Author of Gunmetal Gray “Exciting and well-layered....David Bell is a master storyteller with a sure hand at crafting characters you feel for and stories you relish.”—Allen Eskens, USA Today Bestselling Author of The Life We Bury “A tense and twisty suspense novel about the dark secrets that lie buried within a community and a father who can save his daughter only by uncovering them. Will leave parents wondering just how well they truly know their children.”—Hester Young, author of The Gates of Evangeline and The Shimmering Road “A gripping, immersive tour-de-force full of twists and turns. BRING HER HOME kept me flipping the pages late into the night. Don’t expect to sleep until you’ve finished reading this book. I could not put it down!”—A. J. Banner, bestselling author of The Good Neighbor and The Twilight Wife “In David Bell’s riveting BRING HER HOME, the unthinkable is only the beginning. From there, the story races through stunning twists all the way to its revelation, without letting its heart fall away in the action. Intense, emotional, and deeply satisfying. This one will keep you up late into the night. Don't miss it!”—Jamie Mason, author of Three Graves Full and Monday’s Lie “Spellbinding and pulse-raising, BRING HER HOME hooked me from the first sentence and surprised me until the final pages. Sharply written and richly observed, this book is about the secrets we keep, the mysteries that keep us, and the lengths a father will go to for the daughter he loves. David Bell is a masterful storyteller who has perfected the art of suspense in BRING HER HOME.”—Sarah Domet, author of The Guineveres”

BookFictionSuspenseNovelsThrillersBeach ReadDomestic SuspenseSummer ReadDavid Bell
Book:Bring Her Home
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“God is going to send you someone that will rescue you. Then one day you will rescue them in return and together your story will rescue others. He has always been a God of rescues and a maker of warriors for his grace. You only need to believe that you are part of something greater than you know.”

LoveStoriesHomeActionFaithBeliefFriendshipGracePlansDreamsFutureUnityNovelsWarriorsBeginningsStaying PositiveGuardian AngelsNo CoincidencesGod S Plans
Author:Shannon L. Alder
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“Hearts don't start out frozen," Cassandra said wisely. "Something happened to you." Mr. Severin gave her a slightly mocking glance. "How do you know so much about the heart?" "I've read novels-" Cassandra began earnestly, and was disgruntled to hear his quiet laugh. "Many of them. You don't think a person can learn things from reading novels?" "Nothing that actually applies to life." But the blue-green eyes contained a friendly sparkle, as if he found her charming. "But life is what novels are about. A novel can contain more truth than a thousand newspaper articles or scientific papers. It can make you imagine, just for a little while, that you're someone else- and then you understand more about people who are different from you." The way he listened to her was so very flattering, so careful and interested, as if he were collecting her words like flowers to be pressed in a book. "I stand corrected," he said. "I see I'll have to read one.”

LifeTruthBook QuotesNovelsCassandra RavenelThe Heart
Book:Chasing Cassandra
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“Her Instagram feed filled up with gorgeous photos of her creations displayed alongside books, some of their links tenuous at best. Double chocolate cookies made with huge chunks of Valrhona chocolate found their American-Parisian mash-up reference in Alcott's Little Women. Currant cinnamon rolls as big as a baby's head were paired with The Secret Garden. Her lemon-blueberry muffins posed alongside a favorite childhood picture book, Blueberries For Sal.”

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Book:Brunch at Bittersweet Café
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“What would our debates about fiction look like, I sometimes wonder, if our preferred verbal container for the phenomenon of writing about others was not 'cultural appropriation' but rather 'interpersonal voyeurism' or 'profound-other-fascination' or even 'cross-epidermal reanimation'? Our discussions would still be vibrant, perhaps even still furious—but I’m certain they would not be the same. Aren’t we a little too passive in the face of inherited concepts? We allow them to think for us, and to stand as place markers when we can’t be bothered to think. What she said. But surely the task of a writer is to think for herself! And immediately, within that bumptious exclamation mark, an internal voice notes the telltale whiff of baby boomer triumphalism, of Generation X moral irresponsibility …. I do believe a writer’s task is to think for herself, although this task, to me, signifies not a fixed state but a continual process: thinking things afresh, each time, in each new situation. This requires not a little mental flexibility. No piety of the culture—whether it be 'I think therefore I am,' 'To be or not to be,' 'You do you,' or 'I contain multitudes'—should or ever can be entirely fixed in place or protected from the currents of history. There is always the potential for radical change.”

FictionNovelsCultural AppropriationFascinated To Presume
Author:Zadie Smith
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“Reading seems to be easier to defend than writing. Writing is a far larger act of presumption. Sensing this, we seek to shore up the act of writing with false defenses, like the dubious idea that one could ever be absolutely “correct” when it comes to representing fictional human behavior. I understand the desire—I have it myself—but what I don’t get is how anyone can possibly hope to achieve it. What does it mean, after all, to say “A Bengali woman would never say that!” or “A gay man would never feel that!” or “A black woman would never do that!”? How can such things possibly be claimed absolutely, unless we already have some form of fixed caricature in our minds? (It is to be noted that the argument “A white man would never say that!” is rarely heard and is almost structurally unimaginable. Why? Because to be such a self is to be afforded all possible human potentialities, not only a circumscribed few.)”

FictionNovelsCultural AppropriationFascinated To Presume
Author:Zadie Smith
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“While you were busy trying to prove God stands behind you, God was before me lighting the trail, so he could lead us both.”

GodReligionRelationshipsConflictCommunicateRidiculousSillyMental IllnessPrivacyBe KindProblemsReach OutDogmaPreachingCommandmentsInsecureWorthlessRulesRelentlessPietyForgiveGospelNovelsLow Self EsteemPiousTalkMove OnFacebookSelf RighteousnessOver The TopReligionsLove EveryoneNeighborsSlightedPractice What You PreachHidden AgendasObviousnessJiltedBuilding People UpOut ThereMaking A PointEnd It With TalkingTearing People DownUpfront
Author:Shannon L. Alder
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“Novels aren’t about heroes. They’re about us. The novel is a literary form that arose at the same time as the middle class in Europe, those people of small business and property who are neither peasant nor aristocrat, and it has always treated of the middle class. Both lyric and epic poetry grew out of a time that was elitist, a time that believed in the innate rate of royalty to rule and the rest of us to amount to not very much. Hardly surprising, then, that both forms lean toward the aristocratic in subject matter and treatment. The novel, on the other hand, isn’t about them; it’s about us.”

BooksMiddle ClassNovelsEpic PoetryLyric PoetryWriting HistoryRelateableEveryday People
Book:How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form
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“Hester Lipp had written Where the Sidewalk Starts, an inexplicably acclaimed book of memoir, recounting — in severe language and strange, striking imagery — Lipp's childhood and adolescence on a leafy suburban street in Burlington. Her house was large and well-kept, her schooling uneventful, her family — the members of which she described in scrupulous detail — uniformly decent and supportive. Sidewalk was blurbed as a devastatingly honest account of what it meant to grow up middle class in America. Amy, who forced herself to read the whole thing, thought the book devastatingly unnecessary. The New York Times had assigned it to her for a review, and she stomped on it with both feet. Amy's review of Sidewalk was the only mean-spirited review she ever wrote. She had allowed herself to do this, not because she was tired of memoirs, baffled by their popularity, resentful that somehow, in the past twenty years, fiction had taken a backseat to them, so that in order to sell clever, thoroughly imagined novels, writers had been browbeaten by their agents into marketing them as fact. All this annoyed her, but then Amy was annoyed by just about everything. She beat up on Hester Lipp because the woman could write up a storm and yet squandered her powers on the minutiae of a beige conflict-free life. In her review, Amy had begun by praising what there was to praise about Hester's sharp sentences and word-painting talents and then slipped, in three paragraphs, into a full-scale rant about the tyranny of fact and the great advantages, to both writer and reader, of making things up. She ended by saying that reading Where the Sidewalk Starts was like "being frog-marched through your own backyard.”

Middle ClassWritersNovelsMemoirsBook Reviews
Book:Amy Falls Down
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“The worst feature of the Common Core is its anti-humanistic, utilitarian approach to education. It mistakes what a child is and what a human being is for. That is why it has no use for poetry, and why it boils the study of literature down to the scrambling up of some marketable "skill" [...] you don't read good books to learn about what literary artists do...you learn about literary art so that you can read more good books and learn more from them. It is as if Thomas Gradgrind had gotten hold of the humanities and turned them into factory robotics.”

LiteratureEducationBooksStandardsShakespeareNovelsSchool SystemJoyceDanteTolstoyDostoevskyCommon CoreSchool ReformTolstoi
Author:Anthony Esolen
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“Of course, reading novels was just another form of escape. As soon as he closed their pages he had to come back to the real world. But at some point Tengo noticed that returning to reality from the world of a novel was not as devastating a blow as returning from the world of mathematics. Why should that have been? After much deep thought, he reached a conclusion. No matter how clear the relationships of things might become in the forest of story, there was never a clear-cut solution. That was how it differed from math. The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. Depending on the nature and direction of the problem, a solution could be suggested in the narrative. Tengo would return to the real world with that suggestion in hand. It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell. At times it lacked coherence and served no immediate practical purpose. But it would contain a possibility. Someday he might be able to decipher the spell. That possibility would gently warm his heart from within.”

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Book:1Q84
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