“The beauty of that June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming was in bloom and blossom. The sunlight was a benediction. The breezes were so caressingly soft and intimate on the skin as to be embarrassing.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Drood
“This is every writer's nightmare--the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us...”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Drood
“...speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world'...”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Drood
“His imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Drood
“Very few conversations with Charles Dickens did not include a laugh from him. I had never met a man so given to laughter. Almost no moment or context was too serious for this author not to find some levity in it, as some of us had discovered to our embarrassment at funerals.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Drood
“He was, in other words, a careful man with careless impulses.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Drood
“I doubt if he ever confronted and acknowledged his own deeper motivations, except when they were as pure as spring water.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Drood
“Finding a woman like that amidst the herd of half-feeling, half-caring, half-responding, females in our society of 1860's England was not so much like finding a diamond in the rough as it was finding a warm responsive body amidst the cold dead forms on slabs in the Paris morgue that Dickens had so enjoyed taking me to.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Drood
“(...) Poco después del enorme éxito de "La mujer de blanco", se me preguntó cuál era el secreto de mi éxito; yo, modestamente, le dije a mi interlocutor:
1. Busca una idea central.
2. Idea unos personajes.
3. Deja que los personajes desarrollen los incidentes.
4. Empieza la historia por el principio.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Drood
“Si un escritor se pone muy enfermo, todo se detiene. Si se muere, su "negocio" se acaba para siempre. En este sentido, la carrera de un escritor popular se parece más a la de un famoso actor, pero hasta el actor más famoso tiene un suplente. Un escritor no. Nadie puede sustituirle. Su voz personal lo es todo. Y esto es especialmente cierto en el caso de una escritor popular que ya está en proceso de ser publicado por entregas en una revista de tirada nacional.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Drood
“No tengo que contarle que Martha siguió engordando durante cada embarazo y posteriormente. Después de que naciera William, ella ya no fingió que pudiera despojarse del enorme peso que colgaba de su cuerpo como grandes masas de grasa. Parecía que había abandonado el cuidado de su aspecto. Una vez escribí de Martha R. que era un bello espécimen del tipo de chica que me gustaba: "La auténtica chica carnosa inglesa, alimentada con carne de buey". Pero todo aquel buey que la alimentaba tuvo un efecto predecible. Si me hubiesen pedido que reescribiese aquella frase en 1874, habría dicho: "Es el perfecto espécimen de enorme buey inglés carnoso y alimentado con carne de chica".”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Drood
“It would be wrong to say that love produces quarrels; but love does produce those intimate relations of which quarrelling is too often one of the consequences,—one of the consequences which frequently seem to be so natural, and sometimes seem to be unavoidable. One brother rebukes the other,—and what brothers ever lived together between whom there was no such rebuking?—then some warm word is misunderstood and hotter words follow and there is a quarrel. The husband tyrannizes, knowing that it is his duty to direct, and the wife disobeys, or “only partially obeys, thinking that a little independence will become her,—and so there is a quarrel. The father, anxious only for his son's good, looks into that son's future with other eyes than those of his son himself,—and so there is a quarrel. They come very easily, these quarrels, but the quittance from them is sometimes terribly difficult. Much of thought is necessary before the angry man can remember that he too in part may have been wrong; and any attempt at such thinking is almost beyond the power of him who is carefully nursing his wrath, lest it cool! But the nursing of such quarrelling kills all happiness. The very man who is nursing his wrath lest it “cool,—his wrath against one whom he loves perhaps the best of all whom it has been given him to love,—is himself wretched as long as it lasts. His anger poisons every pleasure of his life. He is sullen at his meals, and cannot understand his book as he turns its pages. His work, let it be what it may, is ill done. He is full of his quarrel,—nursing it. He is telling himself how much he has loved that wicked one, how many have been his sacrifices for that wicked one, and that now that wicked one is repaying him simply with wickedness! And yet the wicked one is at that very moment dearer to him than ever. If that wicked one could only be forgiven how sweet would the world be again! And yet he nurses his wrath.”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from The Last Chronicle of Barset
“Quizá su batalla para establecerse en Old House había terminado, o quizá se equivocaba al pensar que había encontrado su lugar o que podría encontrarlo alguna vez.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, quote from The Bookshop
“I’m egotistical, spoiled and arrogant. She’s kind, generous, and thoughtful.
They’re called ‘better halves’ for a reason, I guess.
You can’t have one half that’s worse than you. It’d be a disaster.”
― Skyla Madi, quote from Forever Consumed
“He has artistry," he repeated. "Because that's what it takes to blow things up. And cook his arm.”
― Tamora Pierce, quote from Mastiff
“He valued these experiences of joy more than anything else he had known, and he desired, as all who have experienced them desire, to have them again and again. It was this mystical quality that set him apart from other boys. He was surprised by joy. He spent the rest of his life searching for more of it.”
― quote from Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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