Fantasy Authors

"He wanted to feed the hunger of his skin. The hunger of his body not so much for orgasm but for that need to be held close and tight, that need we all have to press our nakedness against someone else's."

"Giving up something that no longer serves a purpose, or protects you, or helps you, isn't giving up at all, it's growing up."

"We hate most in others what we dislike in ourselves."

"I stepped out of the car on the rat king's arm, like a trophy wife--except for the wrist sheaths and the two folding knives hidden in my clothing. Somehow I think trophy wives wear more makeup and less cutlery. But, Hey, I haven't met a trophy wife, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they know what I know, that the true way to a man's heart is six inches of metal between his ribs. Sometimes four inches will do the job, but to be really sure, I like to have six. Funny how phallic objects are always more useful the bigger they are. Anyone who tells you size doesn't matter has been seeing too many small knives."

"Always needing to have the last word is a bad trait Ms. Blake, pisses people off."

"Pretend hard enough and maybe it will go away."

"People are supposed to fear the unknown, but ignorance is bliss when the knowledge is so damn frightening."

"My eyes were running because there were pieces of zombie all over my toys, Jesus."

"I could almost smell her fear... Why did it bother me so much? Because she and I were the only women here, and we had to be better than the men. Braver, quicker, whatever. It was a rule for playing with the big boys."

"I won't die, eaten alive," he said. He put a fresh clip in his gun. I'll do you first if you want, or you can do it yourself. Save your bullets, Edward. I lifted a can of gasoline in one hand. What are you planning? he asked. I'm going to set the shed on fire. I splashed gasoline on the door. The smell was sharp and tugged at the back of my throat. With us inside? he asked. Yes. I'd rather shoot myself, if it's all the same to you."

"You will never lose your nerve. Your life, probably, but never your nerve.""

"I hate to waste a really good threat."

"I had been too long away from the nobility; I had forgotten how silly even the best of them could be."

"La gloire est le soleil des morts."

"Je suis un galérien de plume et d'encre."

"In fact, the real problem with the thesis of A Genealogy of Morals is that the noble and the aristocrat are just as likely to be stupid as the plebeian. I had noted in my teens that major writers are usually those who have had to struggle against the odds -- to "pull their cart out of the mud," as I put it -- while writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate -- or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems."

"You are not, with Balzac, in the Elysian fields; you are sometimes much rather in the Halls of Eblis. But, if you can only apprehend it, there is always Imagination to guide, relieve, console you; and it is the Imagination of a Titan, if not exactly of a God."

"I was exposed to Dickens, Dumas, Victor Hugo, de Maupassant, Balzac."

"Stendhal's a good novelist, but I think the limitations of Stendhal have been rather disastrous. I think you'd do better with Balzac. If you have to imitate a Frenchman."

"Balzac said 200 years ago that "behind every great fortune lies a crime," but we know how to create wealth now: the Industrial Revolution created wealth, the and our ability to manipulate cyberspace, and to develop concepts and structures in mathematics, and elsewhere. We can create real wealth. So, per se, being wealthy is now not the result of taking from those with less; and yet this historic problem has come roaring back... under the guise of conservatism."

"Quantity and intensity are at once and together his sign."

"Novelists and short-story writers provide implicitly a critique of their society. The proof of that is the importance given to Balzac's Human Comedy by critics in the Eastern European countries, critics who stem from the extreme left. Balzac himself was an extremely conservative person politically, very reactionary, but in his Comédie Humaine he gave such a truthful, marvellous picture of that very society of which he was a part, that in the eyes of the leftist critics, socialist critics, he gives an unbeatable picture of what was wrong with the bourgeoisie at that time, of the seeds of its own destruction that were within it. A good writer can't help revealing the truth that is in his society and by that token there is a political implication and he is politically committed."

"Balzac, perhaps the most wonderful writer of fiction the world has ever seen, has in many of his novels overstepped this limit. He drags us by his magic force through scene after scene of unmitigated vice, till the effect of walking among this human carrion is a moral nausea."

"I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color-line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of the evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?"

"Balzac's reaction was somewhat different, but in its own way no less flattering. The novelist had become a good friend of both Aurore's and Jules Sandeau's, and they had been amused to see him use the money earned by his La Peau de Chagrin to transform his low-ceilinged apartment on the Rue Cassini into an "assemblage of marquises' boudoirs" — as George Sand later described it — with walls dripping in a feminine exuberance of silk and lace. Once, after entertaining them to a dinner of boiled beef, melons, and champagne (his standard fare), he had insisted on accompanying them home as far as the arrayed in a lovely new dressing gown and with a handsome brass candlestick to light the way, explaining as they went that no robber would dream of attacking him — taking him either for a dangerous madman or a prince whom it would be wiser to respect."

"I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing this way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns the less one knows. I'm still learning how to write. I don't know what technique is. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it. This I learned from Dostoyevsky, from Balzac. I'm sure that my life in France would have been very different had I not met Balzac. Even though I hadn't experienced it yet, I understood something about the concierge, all the French institutions and personalities. The way that country and its society works. How to find my way around in it, not get lost in it, and not feel rejected by it. The French gave me what I could not get in America, which was a sense of "If I can do it, I may do it." I won't generalize, but in the years I grew up in the U.S., I could not do that. I'd already been defined."

"Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine."

"Man has sufficient cause for tears without adding to them by books."

"He has great tranquility of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men."

"Une des obligations auxquelles ne doit jamais manquer un historien des mœurs, c'est de ne point gâter le vrai par des arrangements en apprence dramatiques, surtout quand le vrai a pris la peine de devenir romanesque. La nature sociale, à Paris surtout, comporte de tels hasards, des enchevêtrements de conjectures si capricieuses, que l'imagination des inventeurs est à tout moment dépassée. La hardiesse du vrai s'élève à des combiniasons interdites à l'art, tant elles sont invraisemblables ou peu décentes, à moins que l'écrivain ne les adoucisse, ne les émoude, ne les châtre."

"La solitude, c'est le vide ; et la nature morale en a tout autant d'horreur que la nature physique. La solitude n'est habitable que pour l'homme de génie qui la remplit de ses idées, filles du monde spirituel, ou pour le contemplateur des œuvres divines qui la trouve illuminée par le jour du ciel, animée par le souffle et par la voix de Dieu. Hormis ces deux hommes, si voisins du paradis, la solitude est à la torture ce que le moral est au physique. Entre la solitude et la torture il a toute la différence de la maladie nerveuse à la maladie chirurgicale. C'est la souffrance multipliée par l'infini. Le corps touche à l'infini par le système nerveux, comme l'esprit y pénètre par la pensée."

"Qui dépense trop n’est jamais riche."

"L'égalité sera peut-être un droit, mais aucune puissance humaine ne saura le convertir en fait."

"Tout pouvoir humain est un composé de patience et de temps."

"Le fer cède à certains degrés de battage ou de pression réitérée ; ses impénétrables molécules, purifiées par l'homme et rendues homogènes, se désagrègent ; et, sans être en fusion, le métal n'a plus la même vertu de résistance. Les maréchaux, les serruriers, les taillandiers, tous les ouvriers qui travaillent constamment ce métal en expriment alors l'état par un mot de leur techonologie : "Le fer est roui !" disent-ils en s'appropriant cette expression exclusivement consacrée au chanvre, dont la désorganisation s'obtient par le rouissage. Eh bien, l'âme humaine, ou, si vous voulez la triple énergie du corps, du cœur et de l'esprit se trouve dans une situation analogue à celle du fer, par suite de certains chocs répétés. Il en est alors des hommes comme du chanvre et du fer : ils sont rouis."

"Le crime et la folie ont quelque similitude. Voir les prisonniers de la Conciergerie au préau, ou voir des fous dans le jardin d'une maison de santé, c'est une même chose. Les uns et les autres se promènent en s'évitant, se jettent des regards au moins siguliers, atroces, selon leurs pensées du moment, jamais gais ni sérieux ; car ils se connaissent ou ils se craignent. L'attente d'une condamnation, les remords, les anxiétés donnent aux promeneurs du préau l'air inquiet et hagard des fous. Les criminels consommés ont seuls une assurance qui ressemble à la tranquillité d'une vie honnête, à la sincérité d'une conscience pure."

"La loi est bonne, elle est nécessaire, l'exécution en est mauvaise, et les mœurs jugent les lois d'après la manière dont elles s'exécutent."

"History is of two kinds—there is the official history taught in schools, a lying compilation ad usum delphini; and there is the secret history which deals with the real causes of events—a scandalous chronicle."

"La Pratique parlait son langage positif à la Théorie dont la parole est toujours au Futur."

"Aussi tous avaient-ils besoin d'oublier et leur malheur et leur pensée qui doublait le malheur."

"Qu'est-ce que l'Art, monsieur ? C'est la Nature concentrée."

"Rien n'est-il si discret qu'un jeune visage, parce que rien n'est plus immobile. La figure d'une jeune femme a le calme, le poli, la fraîcheur de la surface d'un lac. La physionomie des femmes ne commence qu'à trente ans."

"L'amour a son instinct, il sait trouver le chemin du cœur comme le plus faible insecte marche à sa fleur avec une irrésistible volonté qui ne s'épouvante de rien."

"Mais la raison est toujours mesquine auprès du sentiment ; l'une est naturellement bornée, comme tout ce qui est positif, et l'autre est infini."

"Les femmes tiennent et doivent toutes tenir à être honorées, car sans l'estime elles n'existent plus. Aussi est-ce le premier sentiment qu'elles demandent à l'amour."

"La sainteté des femmes est inconciliable avec les devoirs et les libertés du monde. Emanciper les femmes, c'est les corrompre."

"La jeune fille n'a qu'une coquetterie, et croit avoir tout dit quand elle a quitté son vêtement ; mais la femme en a d'innombrables et se cache sous mille voiles ; enfin elle caresse toutes les vanités, et la novice n'en flatte qu'une. Il s'émeut d'ailleurs des indécisions, des terreurs, des craintes, des troubles et des orages chez la femme de trente ans, qui ne se rencontrent jamais dans l'amour d'une jeune fille.Arrivée à cet âge, la femme demande à un jeune homme de lui restituer l'estime qu'elle lui a sacrifiée ; elle ne vit que pour lui, s'occupe de son avenir, lui veut une belle vie, la lui ordonne glorieuse ; elle obéit, elle prie et commande, s'abaisse et s'élève, et sait consoler en mille occasions, où la jeune fille ne sait que gémir."

"Un enfant, monsieur, n'est-il pas l'image de deux êtres, le fruit de deux sentiments librement confondus ?"

"Il y a beaucoup d'hommes dont le cœur est puissamment ému par la seule apparence de la souffrance chez une femme : pour eux la douleur semble être une promesse de constance ou d'amour."

"Les jeunes filles se créent souvent de nobles, de ravissantes images, des figures tout idéales, et se forgent des idées chimériques sur les hommes, sur les sentiments, sur le monde ; puis elles attribuent innocemment à un caractère les perfections qu'elles ont rêvées, et s'y confient."