Fate was a reality, but it wasn’t a beautiful or angelic thing. It was a heart-wrenching nightmare. And we’d fallen blindly into it. We had no escape. It was happening, and it was up to...

Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don’t have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up—up, up. And … down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I’m on my feet...

People vote for whom they believe will be the best president and representative for our country. The First Lady is not on the ballot.

Peeta opens his mouth for the first bite without hesitation. He swallows, then frowns slightly. “They’re very sweet.””Yes they’re sugar berries. My mother makes jam from them. Haven’t you’ve ever had them before?” I say,...

It’s best not to get settled on things being a certain way, I realized. Life had a funny way if interrupting your plans.

With literary biographies, you’re either shelved with other biographies or next to your subject’s fiction.

Oh I’m sure you’re right,” Auntie said. “Probably she’s just as you say. But she looks to me like a very clever girl, and adaptable; you can see that from the shape of her ears.

If he’s like any other man I’ve ever met, it’s not my smile he’s going to be looking at.

Surely, she was too young to have so many ghosts.

In darkness there is death.

Any capitalist . . . who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn’t each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more...

I beam back at her. Fuck the surgery, fuck the kids, fuck the men in our lives or no longer in our lives. This is sweet. When she catches up with me, I say, How...

Sex was the main component of her thoughts now. But love – and her desperate longing for it – had vanished from her heart like a migraine after a painkiller.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

We built that Wendy House our own selves, for Wendy! And you can’t keep a Wendy out of her own Wendy House!

Granted, there is always much that is hidden, and we must not forget that the writing of history – however dryly it is done and however sincere the desire for objectivity – remains literature. History’s...

We are all roamers of vast spaces and travelers in many ages.

Such are contrasts we see every day in the world. Joy and Sorrow! But Joy is an exile from Heaven who does not remain in any one place. Sorrow is a son of Hell who...

All I’m saying is that there is more to life than the main story. Check out the notes in the margins because maybe they’re even more important.

Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It’s an addiction to break.

Fairy tales, fantasy, legend and myth…these stories, and their topics, and the symbolism and interpretation of those topics…these things have always held an inexplicable fascination for me,” she writes. “That fascination is at least in...

Let’s all try to be fearless, sometimes we wish for the most perfect of outcomes and we arrive at the most unforgettable. Life can be scary and leave us hiding, but when we come out...

He told himself she wasn’t really such a bad person, she was just a pest, she was sticky, there was something misplaced in her make-up, something that kept her from fading clear of people when...

I wrote a novel. It’s called ‘The Middlesteins.’ It’s fiction. It’s not a memoir. I’m not a spokesperson.

I believe that only poetry counts … A great novelist is first of all a great poet.

For now the world keeps turning and I keep breathing, in and out, in and out. I breathe in the life that is all around me, in this garden, in this city, in the fields...

Starting now,

Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the...

I want to keep you, till the end of days.

It’s a true image, born of a false spectacle.

I think the future deserves our faith. But it is hard to argue with Emily Dickinson.

Reading is a collaboration between the writer and reader. Both parties must keep that in mind when dealing with a work of fiction.”{Guy Gavriel Kay}

I would like [my readers] to better understand human beings and human life as a result of having read [my] stories. I’d like them to feel that this was an experience that made things better...

I was murdered. Even though my heart continued to beat, I was very much deceased. All faded to black

When you least expect it, you run in to an old friend from school, or the neighbour’s cat, not Mary the Virgin Mother of God.

If you have no idea what I’m about to do, just watch and wait..then you’ll see time spin to a stop right before your eyes..and you’ll forget that world you once knew

The rain is a screen that changes the colour of the sky, causing a sepia filter to fall over the city. It is as if the city has gone back in time, to the age...

Kill them. Kill them all. Remind the world what it means to be Arya. Remind the world what it is to walk with the gods. – Syoddhan Kauravya

Living in that castle was like being condemned to Hell before I’d even had the opportunity to sin.

Creativity is a commodity and derives its value only in how energy is spent.

Just a flesh wound.

No me queda más que un día de vida, después de haber escatimado quince millares a la muerte, sólo me resta uno más. Dos, a lo sumo

We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can’t live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When we’re distressed...

I knew I would stay in this town when I found the blue enamel pot floating in the lake. The pot led me to the house, the house led me to the book, the book...

Before unearthing this letter, I had questioned myself about the ways in which a book can be infinite. I could think of nothing other than a cyclic volume, a circular one. A book whose last...

It was unfair that people could pretend to be one thing when they were really something else. That they would get you on their side and then do nothing but fail, and fail, and fail...

Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still...

It was dark, so I couldn’t make out much of her face, but she had brilliant red hair, like honey and roses and the sun altogether.

I sit on the bed. I remember a golden bracelet, thin gold, an apple with a bite taken out of it for the clasp, and the words “I Love You,” and I take it out...

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and...