49 Memorable Quotes From Novels

In the world of literature, certain lines resonate long after the final page is turned, leaving an indelible impact on our minds and hearts. These memorable quotes not only encapsulate the essence of their respective novels but also offer timeless wisdom, wit, and insight into the human condition. Whether whispered in moments of profound realization or proclaimed amidst pivotal events, these words have the power to inspire, challenge, and transform. Join us as we delve into a curated collection of 49 unforgettable quotes from novels, each chosen for its ability to capture the imagination and speak to the universal truths we all share. Prepare to be moved, entertained, and enlightened by these literary gems that continue to shape the world of storytelling.

1. “One did not drink sherry before the evening, just as one did not read a novel in the morning.” - Barbara Pym

2. “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

3. “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

4. “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

5. “All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.” - Michael Chabon

6. “Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.” - Khaled Hosseini

7. “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

8. “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

9. “Remember where you are and adjust yourself accordingly, not vice-versa ... otherwise, you might be toast.” - Alisa Dana Steinberg

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.” - Don DeLillo

23. “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

24. “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

25. “Find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.” - Lauren Oliver

26. “Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.” - Eudora Welty

27. “‎"It almost felt like the dolphin of my heart’s desire playing in the ocean of my life." - on writing” - Mariam Kobras

28. “My brother Keith begged to go with us as usual. He'll turn thirteen in a few days - August 14 - and the thought of waiting two more years until he's 15 must seem impossible to him. I understand. Waiting is terrible. Waiting to be older is worse than other kinds of waiting because there's nothing you can do to make it happen faster.” - Octavia Butler

29. “When I die I hope it may be said:'Her suffering was black, but her books were read'.” - Shannon Alder

30. “We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie.” - Henry James

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “I looked for any footmarks of course, but naturally, with all this rain, there wasn't a sign. Of course, if this were a detective story, there'd have been a convenient shower exactly an hour before the crime and a beautiful set of marks which could only have come there between two and three in the morning, but this being real life in a London November, you might as well expect footprints in Niagara. I searched the roofs right along—and came to the jolly conclusion that any person in any blessed flat in the blessed row might have done it.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

36. “I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!” - Roman Payne

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “تحبني، فأنا المختلفة وأنا الأفضل، وأنا التي لك قلبي يغص بالأمنيات، وأنت الأمنية الجميلة التي تمنيت منذ سنوات مراهقتي الأولى أن تتحقق.” - لطيفة الحاج

41. “أبدا لا أفهمك، أبدا، لكنني كما يقول بهاء طاهر "لا أعرف أسماء الزهور ولكني أحبها".. لا أفهمك تماماً.. ولكني أحبك!” - لطيفة الحاج

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “Life is'nt about getting everything you want the instant you want it.Some thing are worth waiting for.” - mira lyn kelly

47. “Marriage is a partnership, not a democracy.” - Nicholas Sparks

48. “What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.” - Julian Barnes

49. “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