1001 Books List Quotes

“Pity acts through the imagination, the higher light of the world, and imagination arises from the world of things, as a rainbow from the sun.”
― Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter

“Bad world for poor people.”
― Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

“...I'm going to write a little novel entitled 'The History of the Idea of Justice' and won't it be funny!”
― Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education

“Spacious and splendid, like a stage again awaiting a drama, it was a scene she might people, by the press of her spring, either with serenities and dignities and decencies, or with terrors and shames and ruins, things as ugly as those formless fragments of her golden bowl she was trying so hard to pick up.”
― henry james, The Golden Bowl

“To step down there now as if completely free, to be released from the arduous states of play of psychological condition, to have leisure to be open and attentive to perception, to the world whose breathtaking, incessant cascade against the senses was so easily and habitually ignored, dinned out, in the interests of unexamined ideals of personal responsibility, efficiency, citizenship, to step down there now, just walk away, melt into the shadow, would be so very easy.”
― Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers

“...the law has neither eyes, nor ears, nor bowels of humanity; and it turns into marble the hearts of all those that are nursed in its principles.”
― William Godwin, Caleb Williams

“To make a Jewish state we have betrayed our history - we have done unto the Palestinians what the Christians have done unto us: systematically transformed them into the despised and subjugated Other, thereby depriving them of human status. Irrespective of terrorism or terrorists or the political stupidity of Yasir Arafat, the fact is this: as a people the Palestinians are totally innocent and as a people the Jews are totally guilty.”
― Philip Roth, Operation Shylock: A Confession

“How lovely!' she thought sentimentally. 'Is there anything more beautiful? Woman to woman. And they say we don't trust each other!”
― Winifred Watson, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

“We make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run; Rabbit, Redux; Rabbit is Rich; Rabbit at Rest [four volumes]

“His own exclamation: 'Women should be free - as free as we are,' struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as non-existent.”
― Edith Wharton

“Thus, cases of injustice, and oppression, and tyranny, and the most extravagant bigotry, are in constant occurrence among us every day. Is it the custom to trumpet forth much wonder and astonishment at the chief actors therein setting at defiance so completely the opinion of the world; but there is no greater fallacy; it is precisely because they do consult the opinion of their own little world that such things take place at all, and strike the great world dumb with amazement.”
― Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby

“She'd done her face, I guessed, in the hasty, automatic way of women who don't need to slap it on like warpaint.”
― graham swift, The Light of Day

“... try to understand that our souls work like swings: the stronger the push up towards the nobility of the soul, the stronger the swoop down towards the fury of the beast.”
― M. Ageyev, Novel with Cocaine

“The silence of the world could not hold back its greed.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“Emotions are ill-suited for creating systems, my father's friend said, disheartened, whereas that's what we're talking about.”
― Péter Esterházy, Celestial Harmonies

“...useless characters, pointless details, frequent digressions regarding his own unremarkable, woeful self...”
― Aleksandar Hemon, Nowhere Man

“Now I know, whatever your burdens, to hold yourself apart from the lot of more powerful men is an illusion.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“There ought to be a great Distance between Raillery and Satire, so that one may never be mistaken for the other: Raillery ought indeed to surprise, and sensibly touch, those to whom it is directed; but I would not have the Wounds it makes, either deep or lasting: Let those who feel it, be hurt like Persons, who, gathering Roses, are pricked by the Thorns, and find a sweet smell to make amends.”
― Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote

“...they never know one another and they're all crazed and wandering.”
― Edna O'Brien, August Is a Wicked Month

“It is a picture of all Africans.”
― V. S. Naipaul

“...someday someone would dig up his yellow pad and virtually cry eureka when they realized what a teeming fragment of minutia, and yet crucial minutia, had been found...”
― George Saunders, Pastoralia

“There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse Five

“Were it possible that a creature so horrid could be formed, as to partake of the worst qualities of all these characters, - a creature who should have the haughtiness of Mrs. Beaumont, the brutality of Captain Mirvan, the self-conceit of Mrs Selwyn, the affectation of Lady Louisa, and the vulgarity of Madame Duval, - even to such a monster as that, I would pay homage, and pour forth adulation, only to obtain one word, one look from my adored Miss Anville!”
― Fanny Burney, Evelina

“Much of the time you think I am talking rubbish, making things up as I go.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“He painted the loneliness and the smell of the salt-laden cold, the eternity and agelessness of marshes, the wild, living creatures, dawn flights, and frightened things taking to the air, and winged shadows at night hiding from the moon.”
― Paul Gallico, The Snow Goose

“One had the sense of a backwater, or rather of an estuary, whose waters flowed in from the invisible sea, and ebbed into a profound silence while the waves without were still beating.”
― Forster, Howards End

“Surely she had asked for it by being in that taxi with him.”
― patrick hamilton, Hangover Square

“She could remember better now, much better, in fact.”
― Tove Jansson

“Up to a certain hour, the day seemed endless to him, then, suddenly, like a drop of water that after having trembled a moment on the flower of a peach tree, falls suddenly, the day would shatter and die.”
― Ismail Kadare, Broken April

“It's rather sad,' she said one day, 'to belong, as we do, to a lost generation.”
― mitford, The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate