"To Fred, those years seemed to pass like quickly skimming a book and then finding the ending wasn't what he expected. He wished he'd paid more attention to the story."
— Sarah Addison Allen

"My toaster could have a soul,and the walnut grove to the east of my house could be just a bunch of trees or could be made from the atoms of Elvis or Mussolini.Why not?"
— A.S. King

"The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be."
— Socrates (Essential Thinkers - Socrates (Barnes & Noble Collector's Library))

"Are not all religions strange to those who stand outside of them?"
— Christopher Paolini (Brisingr)

"My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real."
— Gustave Flaubert

"The passion for revenge should never blind you to the pragmatics of the situation. There are some people who are so blighted by their past, so warped by experience and the pull of that silken cord, that they never free themselves of the shadows that live in the time machine...

And if there is a kind thought due them, it may be found contained in the words of the late Gerald Kersh, who wrote:"... there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armour, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment."
— Harlan Ellison (The Essential Ellison: A 50 Year Retrospective)

"I'd been in hairier situations than this one. Actually, it's sort of depressing, thinking how many times I'd been in them. But if experience had taught me anything, it was this: No matter how screwed up things are, they can get a whole lot worse."
— Jim Butcher (Blood Rites)

""The pessimist complains about the wind; the optomist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails."
"
— William Arthur Ward college administrator writer 1921-1994

"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 (H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life)

"The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy adversary."
— Edmund Burke (Select Works of Edmund Burke: The Letters on a Regicide Peace)

"On the morning appointed for her departure Tess awake before dawn — at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute save for one prophetic bird, who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence, as if equally convinced that he is mistaken."
— Thomas Hardy

"Of course I know that the twins are only words on a page, and I'm certainly not the sort of writer who talks to his characters or harbours any illusions about the creative process. But at the same time, I think it's juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren't real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative."
— Michel Faber

"Realism can break a writer's heart."
— Salman Rushdie (Shame)