Fiction Quotes
217 quotes
"You can't force love, I realized. It's there or it isn't. If it's not there, you've got to be able to admit it. If it is there, you've got to do whatever it takes to protect the ones you love."
"It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story."
"That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth."
"Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories."
"Sometimes you wake up from a dream. Sometimes you wake up in a dream. And sometimes, every once in a while, you wake up in someone else's dream."
"Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream."
"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?"
"Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice."
"She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city"
"No. No, I don't believe you'd betray me with her. I don't believe you'd cheat on me. But I'm afraid, and I'm sick in my heart that you might look at her, then at me. And regret."
"Well, that depends, I suppose. I heard someone once say that men dance the same way they have sex. So, if you want everyone here to think you're the kind of guy who just sits around and—"He stood up. "Let's dance."
"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
"Why do people always assume that volume will succeed when logic won’t? - Damon"
"There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth."
"The Queen's Pride was his ship, and he loved her. (That was the way his sentences always went: It is raining today and I love you. My cold is better and I love you. Say hello to Horse and I love you. Like that.)"
"I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them."
"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."
"If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there."
"And then there are the rare ones who know love, who understand it. Who freely give of themselves, demanding only a return of that love,that trust."
"After a moment, Wrath turned to John. "This is Lassiter, the fallen angel. One of the last times he was here on earth, there was a plague in central Europe-""Okay, that was so not my fault-""-which wiped out two-thirds of the human population.""I'd like to remind you that you don't like humans.""They smell bad when they're dead.""All you mortal types do."
"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"
"I can't go on, I'll go on."
"We'd stared into the face of Death, and Death blinked first. You'd think that would make us feel brave and invincible. It didn't."
"But I couldn't help myself, couldn't help the way I felt as I recalled the bliss and rush of a vampire's bite."
"As a fiction writer, let me make it up, and let me make it up to you. I’ll pen our love story, if you’ll be my co-author."
"As a man, I instantly became aware of the gold in her hair, her height measured against mine, and how easily she'd fit in my arms. ~Ren"
"Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species."
"A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth."
"So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it."
"I knew from the moment I heard you, the moment I saw the gun and realized that this lovely, petit woman was the executioner, that you would never die waiting for me to save you - that you would save yourself."
"When I walk, I walk with you. Where I go, you're with me always."
"Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent."
"Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.."
"V shook his head. “Remember what you saw in that clearing, cop? How’d you like that anywhere near a female you loved?”Butch put down the Bud without drinking from it. His eyes traveled over Rhage’s body.“We’re going to need a shitload of steel,” the human muttered."
"We are born to love as we are born to die, and between the heartbeats of those two great mysteries lies all the tangled undergrowth of our tiny lives. There is nowhere to go but through. And so we walk on, lost, and lost again, in the mapless wilderness of love."
"As a girl, she had come to believe in the ideal man -- the prince or knight of her childhood stories. In the real world, however, men like that simply didn't exist."
"Plan B?' Ivy said. 'What is plan B?'Jenks reddened. 'Grab the fish and run like hell,' he muttered, and I almost giggled."
"When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story."
"Maybe he thinks he can rescue me? No one is that stupid."
"Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth."
"Come on, it’s an American tradition. Apple soup? Mom’s homemade chicken pie?' She chuckled in spite of herself, then winced. 'It’s apple pie and Mom’s homemade chicken soup. But you didn’t do badly, for a start."
"Tell you what, you let me go, and I’ll ask you plenty of questions about your race. Until then, I’m slightly distracted with how this little vacation on the good ship Holy Sh*t is going to pan out for me."
"Yeah, tell me I’m a bottle of single malt scotch, she thought. That’s the way to my heart."
"Vampires. Honestly, they're like children sometimes."
"I feel ill,"[Howl] announced. "I'm going to bed, where I may die."
"If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats."
"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners."
"...he had a way of taking your hand which made it clear he'd have to be the one to let go."From Alice Hoffman's "Local Girls", pg.102."
"Everything I know, I know because of love."
"Try to find pleasure in the speed that you're not used to. Changing the way you do routine things allows a new person to grow inside of you. But when all is said and done, you're the one who must decide how you handle it."
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