In the world of literature, certain lines transcend their stories, resonating with readers long after the book is closed. These memorable quotes possess the power to encapsulate profound truths, evoke deep emotions, and spark inspiration. Whether whispered by beloved characters or penned in the narrative voice, they often strike a chord that echoes across generations. This carefully curated compilation of 122 memorable quotes from novels offers a glimpse into the wisdom, wit, and wonder that literature brings to our lives. Dive in and rediscover the magic and insight these powerful words have to offer, each one leaving an indelible imprint on the tapestry of our shared literary heritage.
1. “I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose.” - Sven Birkerts
2. “It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language” - Jane Austen
3. “Up until then, whenever anyone had mentioned the possibility of making a film adaptation, my answer had always been, ‘No, I’m not interested.’ I believe that each reader creates his own film inside his head, gives faces to the characters, constructs every scene, hears the voices, smells the smells. And that is why, whenever a reader goes to see a film based on a novel that he likes, he leaves feeling disappointed, saying: ‘the book is so much better than the film.” - Paulo Coelho
4. “You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.” - Azar Nafisi
5. “I came, I saw, I concurred...” - Darren E. Laws
6. “Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.” - Flannery O'Connor
7. “One did not drink sherry before the evening, just as one did not read a novel in the morning.” - Barbara Pym
8. “A story conducted by the time of a clock and calendars alone would be a story not of human beings but of mechanical toys.” - Mary Lascelles
9. “Romance novels are birthday cake and life is often peanut butter and jelly. I think everyone should have lots of delicious romance novels lying around for those times when the peanut butter of life gets stuck to the roof of your mouth.” - Janet Evanovich
10. “People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.” - G.K. Chesterton
11. “We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there's an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves. If it wasn't for our longing for these things, I doubt the novel or the short story would exist in its current form. I'm not going to say much more on the topic. Just remember: In dictatorships, only one person is really allowed to speak. And when I write a book or a story, I too am the only one speaking, no matter how I hide behind my characters.” - Junot Diaz
12. “All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.” - Michael Chabon
13. “A novel must show how the world truly is, how characters genuinely think, how events actually occur. A novel should somehow reveal the true source of our actions.” - Kevin Hood
14. “I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any. ” - Jean Rhys
15. “Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.” - Khaled Hosseini
16. “I have often wondered, Sir, [. . .] to observe so few Instances of Charity among Mankind; for tho' the Goodness of a Man's Heart did not incline him to relieve the Distresses of his Fellow-Creatures, methinks the Desire of Honour should move him to it. What inspires a Man to build fine Houses, to purchase fine Furniture, Pictures, Clothes, and other things at a great Expence, but an Ambition to be respected more than other People? Now would not one great Act of Charity, one Instance of redeeming a poor Family from all the Miseries of Poverty, restoring an unfortunate Tradesman by a Sum of Money to the means of procuring a Livelihood by his Industry, discharging an undone Debtor from his Debts or a Goal, or any such Example of Goodness, create a Man more Honour and Respect than he could acquire by the finest House, Furniture, Pictures or Clothes that were ever beheld? For not only the Object himself who was thus relieved, but all who heard the Name of such a Person must, I imagine, reverence him infinitely more than the Possessor of all those other things: which when we so admire, we rather praise the Builder, the Workman, the Painter, the Laceman, the Taylor, and the rest, by whose Ingenuity they are produced, than the Person who by his Money makes them his own.” - Henry Fielding
17. “The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.” - D. H. Lawrence
18. “and if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel–writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding — joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine–hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens — there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel–reader — I seldom look into novels — Do not imagine that I often read novels — It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss — ?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best–chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it.” - Jane Austen
19. “Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.” - Cory Doctorow
20. “Remember where you are and adjust yourself accordingly, not vice-versa ... otherwise, you might be toast.” - Alisa Dana Steinberg
21. “Oh! And they read English novels! David! Did you ever look into an English novel? Well, do not trouble yourself. It is nothing but a lot of nonsense about girls with fanciful names getting married.” - Susanna Clarke
22. “The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final event, can hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity.” - Jane Austen
23. “I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.” - Terry Pratchett
24. “Mental Note #50: The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, even though it most desperately wants to. - Notes from Ellen Wasserfeldman” - Alisa Dana Steinberg
25. “No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.” - Ishmael Reed
26. “i love purple and blue!!!!!” - Alyson Noel
27. “Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.” - Michel Houellebecq
28. “he best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species.” - Machado de Assis
29. “After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving away to deductions and other forms of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement.” - Jules De Goncourt
30. “In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one's legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.” - J.G. Ballard
31. “It is practically an axiom in psychiatry that precocious intellect combined with physical weakness can give rise to many unpleasant character traits - avarice, delusions of grandeur , and obsessive masturbation, to name just a few. ” - Sam Savage
32. “The average novel invariably reads like a detective's report. It is drab and tedious because it is never objective.” - Natsume Soseki
33. “Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world.” - Laura Malone Elliott
34. “A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.” - Lorrie Moore
35. “The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves hat we would never see, never permit ourselves to see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again” - Thomas C. Foster
36. “When I want to read a novel, I write one.” - Benjamin Disraeli
37. “The main question to a novel is -- did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not -- story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing.” - Sydney Smith
38. “The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.” - Wilkie Collins
39. “Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.” - Stendhal
40. “Sir,’ said Stephen, ‘I read novels with the utmost pertinacity. I look upon them--I look upon good novels--as a very valuable part of literature, conveying more exact and finely-distinguished knowledge of the human heart and mind than almost any other, with greater breadth and depth and fewer constraints.” - Patrick O'Brian
41. “I'm a writer by profession and it's totally clear to me that since I started blogging, the amount I write has increased exponentially, my daily interactions with the views of others have never been so frequent, the diversity of voices I engage with is far higher than in the pre-Internet age—and all this has helped me become more modest as a thinker, more open to error, less fixated on what I do know, and more respectful of what I don't. If this is a deterioration in my brain, then more, please."The problem is finding the space and time when this engagement stops, and calm, quiet, thinking and reading of longer-form arguments, novels, essays can begin. Worse, this also needs time for the mind to transition out of an instant gratification mode to me a more long-term, thoughtful calm. I find this takes at least a day of detox. Getting weekends back has helped. But if there were a way to channel the amazing insights of blogging into the longer, calmer modes of thinking ... we'd be getting somewhere."I'm working on it.” - Andrew Sullivan
42. “Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code ... a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name."(Discussion at Woodruff Auditorium in Lawrence, KS; October 7, 2005.)” - Salman Rushdie
43. “The English novels are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. But one should not be too severe on them. They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.” - Oscar Wilde
44. “I think: perhaps the sky is a huge sea of fresh water and we, instead of walking under it, walk on top of it; perhaps we see everything upside down and the earth is a kind of sky, so that when we die, when we die, we fall and sink into the sky.The Implacable Order of Things” - José Luis Peixoto
45. “I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.” - E.M. Forster
46. “Formerly I believed books were made like this: a poet came, lightly opened his lips, and the inspired fool burst into song – if you please! But it seems, before they can launch a song, poets must tramp for days with callused feet, and the sluggish fish of the imagination flounders softly in the slush of the heart. And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth of loves and nightingales, the tongueless street merely writhes for lack of something to shout or say” - Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky
47. “I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business.The day you die.” - Yasunari Kawabata
48. “The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.” - Milan Kundera
49. “He shivered. His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kissed.” - Neil Gaiman
50. “It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our sense of understanding and discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty , and understanding. Like literature generally, fiction is a form of discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty, and understanding. If it is all these things, the question of whether it is a legitimate use of time should not even arise.” - Leland Ryken
51. “A novel, in which all is created by the author's whim, must strike a more profound level of truth, or it is worthless.""And yet, I have heard you say that any novel that relieves your ennui for an hour has proved its usefulness.""You have a good memory. It must have been ten thousands of years ago that I uttered those words.""And if it was?""In another ten thousand, perhaps I will agree with them again.""In my opinion, the proper way to judge a novel is this: Does it give one an accurate reflection of the moods and characteristics of a particular group of people in a particular place at a particular time? If so, it has value. Otherwise, it has none.""You do not find this rather narrow?""Madam—""Well?""I was quoting you.” - Steven Brust
52. “Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties."(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)” - John Irving
53. “As it is I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I had never written Voss, which is going to be everybody's albatross.” - Patrick White
54. “Superficially my war was a comfortable exercise in futility carried out in a grand Scottish hotel amongst the bridge players and swillers of easy-come-by whisky. My chest got me out of active service and into guilt, as I wrote two, or is it three of the novels for which I am now acclaimed.” - Patrick White
55. “When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.” - Don DeLillo
56. “It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.” - Don DeLillo
57. “I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time.” - Sue Monk Kidd
58. “Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us. ” - Novalis
59. “In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.” - Raymond Chandler
60. “Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn't be.” - Anna Godbersen
61. “What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.American novels, answered Lord Henry.” - Oscar Wilde
62. “A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way.” - Haruki Murakami
63. “I think the reason novels are regarded to have so much more 'information' than films is that they outsource the scenic design and cinematography to the reader... This, for me, is a powerful argument for the value and potency of literature specifically. Movies don't demand as much from the player. Most people know this; at the end of the day you can be too beat to read but not yet too beat to watch television or listen to music.” - Brian Christian
64. “Henry James said there isn't any difference between "the English novel" and "the American novel" since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.” - Eudora Welty
65. “"It almost felt like the dolphin of my heart’s desire playing in the ocean of my life." - on writing” - Mariam Kobras
66. “It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.” - P.G. Wodehouse
67. “If you haven't cried at least once while writing a chapter of your inspirational book, then you have to ask yourself if your're writing fiction.” - Shannon L. Alder
68. “There is no endTo what a living worldWill demand of you.” - Octavia E. Butler
69. “When I die I hope it may be said:'Her suffering was black, but her books were read'.” - Shannon Alder
70. “We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie.” - Henry James
71. “That was how the heroine of a book would play it and Diana was still writing her own story the best heroines she'd always believed took their fate into their own hands.” - Anna Godbersen
72. “She found herself longing for home-not just for the hotel but for New York and all the real novels that she could lose herself in there.” - Anna Godbersen
73. “[T]he success of every novel -- if it's a novel of action -- depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, "What are my big scenes?" and then get every drop of juice out of them."(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)” - P.G. Wodehouse
74. “Every novel is an attempt to capture time, to weave something solid out of air. The author knows it is an impossible task - that is why he keeps on trying.” - David Beaty
75. “There are three secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.” - W. Somerset Maugham
76. “He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.” - Julian Barnes
77. “If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count today and those words aren’t going to wait for you whether you’re inspired or not.You have to write when you’re not inspired. And you have to write the scenes that don’t inspire you. And the weird thing is that six months later, a year later, you’ll look back at them and you can’t remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you just wrote because they had to be written next.The process of writing can be magical. …Mostly it’s a process of putting one word after another.” - Neil Gaiman
78. “لو تدري لذة أن تمشي في شارع مرفوع الرأس ، أن تقابل أيّ شخص بسيط أو هام جداً، دون أن تشعر بالخجل.هناك من لا يستطيع اليوم أن يمشي خطوتين على قدميه في الشارع ، بعدما كانت كلّ الشوارع محجوزة له . وكان يعبرها في موكب من السيارات الرسمية” - أحلام مستغانمي
79. “Spilling a Secret What its size, will have varying consequences. It’s not possible to predict what will happen if you open the gunnysack, let the cat escape. A liberated feline might purr on your lap, or it might scratch your eyes out. You can’t tell until you loosen the knot. Do you chance losing a friendship, if that friend’s well-being will only be preserved by betraying sworn-to silence trust? Once the seam is ripped, can it be mended again? And if that proves impossible, will you be okay when it all falls to pieces?” - Ellen Hopkins
80. “My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite.” - Ghassan Kanafani
81. “Someone ought to write a novel about me,” said Lebedeva loftily. “I shouldn’t care if they lied to make it more interesting, as long as they were good lies, full of kisses and daring escapes and the occasional act of barbarism. I can’t abide a poor liar.” - Catherynne M. Valente
82. “Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the “physical pleasure of turning actual pages” and how ebook will “never replace the real thing”. Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up. Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut. First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. They’re only happy looking in the rear-view mirror.” - Charlie Brooker
83. “While art thrives on the blazing colours of scandal, literature blossoms on the dark soil of tragedy.” - E.A. Bucchianeri
84. “I’ve only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a "serious" novel.” - Roman Payne
85. “I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.” - Martin Amis
86. “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.” - Haruki Murakami
87. “I like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don't feel that way about it. Sometimes it's difficult. You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think ... that's your signpost and your guide. You'll never get there, but without it you won't get anywhere.[Interview with Oprah Winfrey, June 5, 2007]” - Cormac McCarthy
88. “After all, isn't the purpose of the novel, or of a museum, for that matter, to relate our memories with such sincerity as to transform individual happiness into a happiness all can share?” - Orhan Pamuk
89. “Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel. Almost everything else was subjugated to this ruling passion, reading stories. As a consequence, I can barely add a column of double digits, I have not the slightest idea of how a plane flies, I can't draw any better than a five-year-old.” - zadie smith
90. “تحبني، فأنا المختلفة وأنا الأفضل، وأنا التي لك قلبي يغص بالأمنيات، وأنت الأمنية الجميلة التي تمنيت منذ سنوات مراهقتي الأولى أن تتحقق.” - لطيفة الحاج
91. “تحبني لأننا نتشابه كثيرا ونختلف أكثر، وأحبك لأنك تلهمني وتفهمني وتتقبل جنوني.” - لطيفة الحاج
92. “كيفما كان وجهه، سيبقى وجها أحبه.” - لطيفة الحاج
93. “أبدا لا أفهمك، أبدا، لكنني كما يقول بهاء طاهر "لا أعرف أسماء الزهور ولكني أحبها".. لا أفهمك تماماً.. ولكني أحبك!” - لطيفة الحاج
94. “قرأت مرة: يسهل على الرجل أن يحب المرأة التي تستمع له. أنا استمع لك كل الوقت، بكل حواسي، فهل سيأتي اليوم الذي تحبني فيه؟” - لطيفة الحاج
95. “أنا نجمة لأنك القمر الذي يحتاج نوري، أو أني نجمة بعيدة صغيرة وأنت القمر وسيد السماء.” - لطيفة الحاج
96. “وحده البكاء والحزن كان يحتضن وحدتي، وحدتي التي وددت لو تخترقها بكلماتك، لو تسمح لي على الأقل بأن أحبك على طريقي، بأن أقول لك كل شيء عني، بأن تتقبل ثرثراتي ولا تتمنى أن أختفي من الكون أنا التي صارت أمنيتي الوحيدة أن يخلو الكون من الناس وتبقى أنت.” - لطيفة الحاج
97. “نحن حين نحب لا نتساءل على الأعمار، لا تشغلنا الظروف، لا تؤرقنا الحقائق، ولا تهمنا الصغائر.” - لطيفة الحاج
98. “العشاق لا يرون، لا يعون الأمور التي لا تتوافق مع ما يريدون الوصول إليه، لا يعترفون بأي شيء يثنيهم عن الوصول إلى هدفهم” - لطيفة الحاج
99. “What we can imagine we can make real” - Nadine May
100. “And she did what nobody thought of doing... she consulted Anne.” - Jane Austen
101. “Sometimes you can write about a character's day in under a minute and sometimes it takes a day just to write about a minute.” - Jennifer v Clancy
102. “The true magic of novels dwells within us individually. Each reader will interpret every single character, scene, and metaphor in a slightly different way” - Carl Henegan
103. “Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.” - Michael Ondaatje
104. “Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.” - Michael Ondaatje
105. “A mysterious ability, a broken promise, a life changed forever...” - Kim Hornsby
106. “I write romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” - Angeline M. Bishop
107. “I write about romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” - Angeline M. Bishop
108. “...you mean you don't fit characters into a plot? excatly...” - John Geddes A Familiar Rain
109. “If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?” - E.A. Bucchianeri
110. “[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art--novels, poems, plays, paintings or films--can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world.” - Alain De Botton
111. “A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist-- ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.” - Jonathan Carroll
112. “The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.” - Michael Ondaatje
113. “Two questions form the foundation of all novels: "What if?" and "What next?" (A third question, "What now?", is one the author asks himself every 10 minutes or so; but it's more a cry than a question.) Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if "X" happened? That's how you start.” - Tom Clancy
114. “If the shining sun blinds the eye,it makes sense. But to be blinded by gold and silver!” - I.R. Shankar
115. “Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.” - Ralph Ellison
116. “Life is'nt about getting everything you want the instant you want it.Some thing are worth waiting for.” - mira lyn kelly
117. “Marriage is a partnership, not a democracy.” - Nicholas Sparks
118. “What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.” - Julian Barnes
119. “Ivanov: And this whole romance of ours is commonplace and trite: he lost heart, and he lost his way. She came along, strong and brave in spirit, and gave him an helping hand. That's all very well and plausible in novels, but in life...Sasha: In life it's the same.Ivanov: I see you have a fine understanding of life!” - Anton Chekhov
120. “A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.” - Azar Nafisi
121. “There is much to discover that's not on the back cover!” - E.A. Bucchianeri
122. “The clock ticks; the taunting rhythm serving as a reminder that forward is the only way we can go. The mechanical heartbeat of the darkness, a cold ellipsis, punctuating years gone by. Arising unchained.No glorious hymn, just the steady beat of the illusion of time. We heal or we carry forward the weight of our wounds... To believe otherwise is the mendacity of desperation. Arising honestly. The miles behind are littered with the weight of nostalgia, but too many miles lay ahead us to carry the weight. In the end, even echoes fade away. Pen in hand...Arising to write the next chapter.(MU Articles 2013, Dedication to Joey)” - Shannon L. Alder
