Graham Greene
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. — Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (Heinemann, 1951)
Category: Literary Fiction
William Faulkner
He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack. — William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (Harrison Smith, 1930)
Nikos Kazantzakis
This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right and to realize of a… Continue reading Nikos Kazantzakis
Don DeLillo
It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone. — Don DeLillo, White Noise (Viking, 1985)
Clarice Lispector
But after much thought, I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing more difficult in this world than to surrender completely. This is one of man’s greatest sorrows. ― Clarice Lispector, Selected Cronicas. (New Directions November 17, 1996)
James Joyce
And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird’s life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird’s heart? ― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young… Continue reading James Joyce
James Joyce
Her lips touched his brain as they touched his lips, as though they were a vehicle of some vague speech and between them he felt an unknown and timid pleasure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odor. — James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics,… Continue reading James Joyce
Jeffrey Eugenides
It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water. — Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex. (Picador September 16, 2002)
John Steinbeck
Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy,… Continue reading John Steinbeck
Milan Kundera
That is the secret of poetry. We burn in the woman we adore, we burn in the thought we espouse, we burn in the landscape that moves us. — Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. (Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reprint edition (April 7, 1999)
The Vale of Soul-Making 