All Quotes By Tag: Fiction

“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.”

“When someone cries so hard that it hurts their throat, it is out of frustration or knowing that no matter what you can do or attempt to do can change the situation. When you feel like you need to cry, when you want to just get it out, relieve some of the pressure from the inside – that is true pain. Because no matter how hard you try or how bad you want to, you can’t. That pain just stays in place. Then, if you are lucky, one small tear may escape from those eyes that water constantly. That one tear, that tiny, salty, droplet of moisture is a means of escape. Although it’s just a small tear, it is the heaviest thing in the world. And it doesn’t do a damn thing to fix anything.”

“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. ”

“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.”

“In life, wisdom usually came with age, but death offered another world.”

“Contentment is quite a different thing from pleasure.”

“I can ill-afford to turn the fickle propensity of my attitude into the rock hard conviction of a fact. For if my attitude is given that much room to run, it will run from the very ‘fact’ that it purports to be.”

“My mum always said the three most important letters in my name were the EDN, because if you rearranged them it spelled ‘END’ and I was the end of anything good in her life.Ryan says the letters rearranged in my name are NEED and he will always need me to be the best version of himself he can be.I think I like Ryan’s version better.”

“A novel is no place to look for happiness.”

“To love, to live, to feel so much that your world keeps spinning, faster and faster, in that wonderful, chaotic mess of humanity that you’d so hastily give up. Immortality is overrated. It is nothing but the ability to live through it all and not experience a single thing, to eat everything without tasting it at all.” Isak’s eyes shone with a desperate need. He wanted, more than anything it seemed, to be like me, when all I wanted was to be like him.”

“Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognised: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has advanced.”

“Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.”

“It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”

“I would not have majored in English and gone on to teach literature had I not been able to construct a counterargument about the truthfulness of fiction; still, as writers turn away from the industrious villages of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, I learn less and less from them that helps me to ponder my life. In time, I found myself agreeing with the course evaluations written by my testier freshman students:’All the literature we read this term was depressing.’ How naive. How sane.”

“Hey, I write fiction. I just make this stuff up, unless I get my hands on some good juicy truth. You know the kind I’m talking about … that stranger-than variety.”