Top 83 Contemporary Novel Quotes
#1. There's no such thing as the contemporary novel. Before I seem the complete reactionary, let me add that I've happily joined in many discussions about 'the contemporary novel' where what that usually, unproblematically means is novels that have appeared recently or may appear soon.
Graham Swift
#2. I wrote 'Don't Look Back' in November 2011, and when I wrote the novel, it wasn't contracted, so there was a freedom in that - no expectations or anything like that. It was also my first contemporary novel I'd written and sold, which was to Disney/Hyperion in January of 2012.
Jennifer Armentrout
#3. I start with theory rather than people. I don't like novels which have no theoretical or philosophical underpinning. I hate the contemporary novel where people just sit and talk to each other about their relationships.
Neel Mukherjee
#4. I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.
Rose Tremain
#5. You thought I didn't notice the way you two looked at each other? I may be old but I'm not blind. I remember that
feeling. The spark, the electricity ...
I had to interject before I got the unabridged version of Anjali Does Mumbai.
Nicola Marsh
#6. Above The Thunder is passionate, wise, and piercingly beautiful. Readers drawn to books with rich, memorable characters and contemporary stories will find this remarkable debut novel not only irresistible but impossible to put down.
Tony Ardizzone
#7. Whenever I read a contemporary literary novel that describes the world we're living in, I wait for the science fiction tools to come out. Because they have to - the material demands it.
William Gibson
#8. Nothing felt better to him than the act of waiting for her. As long as he believed it wasn't in vain, he was able to justify his presence.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#9. Thank God there are places
with sounds that make me cry
from beauty,
not from pain.
Stasia Ward Kehoe
#10. Will you have any regrets once she's dead?
Brooklyn's question and her voice echoed in my head as I watched her walking to her house, her hips swaying tantalizingly at every step. A heavy weight fell on my shoulders because I didn't have to ponder that question to find the answer.
Stephanie Witter
#11. He now realized that right and wrong were intertwined notions. His arms could not differentiate between just and unjust causes. They only knew that they were empty.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#12. She might have been there for you in the aftermath, but I was there when everything came crashing down.
Megan Duke
#13. Take a table and I'll join you in a second.'
When he walked away I did something I couldn't be scolded for doing.
I checked out his ass in his jeans and ... that looked good.
Stephanie Witter
#14. Being with Demetri wasn't the absence of pain, it was the added presence of peace, making it easier and easier for that little part of my heart to heal again.
From Pull: A Seaside Novel
Rachel Van Dyken
#15. Good humour was miles behind a second cup of morning tea. It was too early for nonsense.
Zeenat Mahal
#16. My eyes refuse to let him leave, but he stands still holding my hand, lingering for as long as possible.
Thomas Sweeney
#17. You said my name and my heart went rogue
Zandile
#18. Was love ever easy for anyone? If less complicated, would this make it less appreciated? Perhaps love was difficult for good reason. Perhaps everything on God's green earth was the result of a flawless plan, even that which seemed most muddled.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#19. Congratulations," she said. "You win.
Megan Duke
#20. My mother clutches at the collar of my shirt. I rub her back and feel her tears on my neck. It's been decades since our bodies have been this close. It's an odd sensation, like a torn ligament knitting itself back, lumpy and imperfect, usable as long as we know not to push it too hard.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#21. Hughes' debut novel, At Dawn, follows a former All-American wrestler, and is there any better metaphor for contemporary American life? We're all wrestling, tussling with the economy, no jobs, doing the best we can. Hughes doesn't flinch from the tough existential questions. He embraces them.
Joshua Mohr
#22. Time had taught him that whether his sins were pardoned or left unforgiven, they would remain committed. Tomorrow he would hopefully choose wiser, with a stronger measure of compassion.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#23. I was falling back again and fast, or maybe I'd never stopped feeling something for him. And it was still hopeless, but at least, I could touch him a little bit.
Stephanie Witter
#24. Have you ever believed in something so completely that you were willing to give up everything and everyone in your life to protect it?
Thomas Sweeney
#25. Roger that, Lieutenant. We're boots to the ground. You need firepower?"
Walker shook his head at the man's enthusiasm. "No firepower necessary. We're using brains today, Cudahy. I know it may be a novel experience for you four, but it's a good time to start.
Christina Skye
#26. It was almost as if she had willed him into existence, into standing before her at the precise moment she was willing to accommodate him, arriving not a minute too early or too late.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#27. I have written millions of words about contemporary England - in journalism. Why don't I take it as the background for a novel? I may do one day. But the simple answer is that it does not excite the novelistic part of my brain; it does not fire it up.
Sebastian Faulks
#28. A day without someone to hold you or a day without someone to share, is a day easily forgotten.' - Vera Richardson in Mr Alhourani's Dead Man's Spots
D.M. Lee
#29. He brought his forehead against mine and we breathed the same air, slowly to try and find our composure. But it was impossible for me as long as he's so close to me. "You're ruining me.'
"You ruined me.
Stephanie Witter
#30. Be myself. If only I remembered what it was like to be myself. I'm a fucking waitress in a crappy bar in a small town in the middle of nowhere. I was going nowhere. I had nothing to give him beside myself and my heart and he denied me.
Stephanie Witter
#31. If it was possible for two people to make sparks, simply by connecting at their lips, I would think we would have been a firework display in the dark.
Kristen Hope Mazzola
#32. A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.
Chaim Potok
#33. A tightrope walker uncertain if he could make it to the other side probably would not. A race car driver wondering if he was taking a turn too fast was likely to lose control. If a man feared death, whether his own or the taking of another's, death would surely come calling.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#34. Promoting a contemporary Australian novel is like landing at Gallipoli. You have to dig in and try to take some ground.
Russell Guy
#35. ...forever meant different things to people at different times. They could imagine what infinity looked and felt like as much as they wanted, but could never truly grasp its meaning nor bear its full weight.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#36. Mags, I don't know how many more times I will have to say this, but here it goes. You're amazing, you deserve the best, and I want nothing more than to be whatever you need me to be.
Kristen Hope Mazzola
#37. Love can give you the most exhilarating wonderful highs at times ...
... Then there will be dives that will take all you have just to hold on ...
Quote on the Title Page of Love TORN Asunder
Elizabeth Funderbirk
#39. Whatever it was that came over him that night pulled a cord - her laugh, or her surprise gasp slipping out to think he'd do something so bold.
Mary J. McCoy-Dressel
#40. I think I knew from the first moment I met her, she would be the one to replace me. I didn't think it would happen that fast, but it did.
Megan Duke
#41. Dear Diary:
I have a confession to make: I've become a total idiot over French pastries.
They're my new favorite food.
My new-found edible souvenir.
My new favorite sin.
Dunkin Donuts is so yesterday.
Kimberley Montpetit
#42. When he spoke of love, it was in the manner of someone who can recite a phrase in a foreign language but has no idea what it means. He only knows that it sounds pretty.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#43. Can I kiss you?" And she would let him, lightly on her lips, a moment of brief anticipation. "Your kisses are like sugar woman." He would tell her affectionately. "So sweet." He would close in on her and then ask softly, "Please spend the night with me.
Keira D. Skye
#44. And on bad days, when his aura of sadness blazed like an alarm he couldn't turn off, I felt like I was doing everything wrong.
Lindsey Frydman
#45. If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe the challenge for the novelist is to stretch his art and his language, to the point where it can finally describe what's happening around him.
Don DeLillo
#46. There are some short essays that are very grave, and most contemporary novels are lighter than air.
Fran Lebowitz
#47. His fierce appreciation of female beauty, the unrelenting desire he felt for their company, the pleasure he both derived and sought to give, had led him in and out of quite a few bedroom doors.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#48. Ethan: "I'm not asking you to continue that night."
Karis: "Then what are you asking?"
Ethan: "For a whole new night.
Monique DeVere
#49. Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#50. Focus. She's Maddie. Your friend. Would you eyeball Keith or Dane's butt like that? ~ Zach
Monique DeVere
#51. The contemporary memoir is playing an important role in at least just bringing certain relationships out into the open in American society, and also it's a place where the novel of development, the novel of consciousness, has gone.
Marco Roth
#52. I'm going to turn my life around. Make a complete three sixty."
"Don't you mean one eighty?" he corrected. "If you do that, you'll end up right back where you started."
"Maybe. But at least I'll have a chance of coming out of it a different person - a better version of me.
Megan Duke
#53. The contemporary crime novel is, at its best, a novel of character. That's where the suspense comes from.
Val McDermid
#54. Mattie, I'm sorry to drag you away." "Don't worry about it. It's late. My mother always said nothing good happens after midnight." I barked out a surprised laugh. "Your mother, clearly, is not a Sidhe.
Belinda M. Gordon
#55. When death becomes an escape, when it becomes attractive, the purpose of life is fulfilled. To teach one it's futility, it's worthlessness, that is the purpose of life. Incongruously, its value lies in having imparted that lesson.
Bhanggi
Faiqa Mansab
#56. Talk to me. Say something, anything," he pleaded quietly as if he was trying to tame a wild animal.
"There's nothing to say."
He looked up and lowered his eyebrows on his eyes. "Why did you kiss me?
Stephanie Witter
#57. It is not often that I have two options to choose from. It is nice to be compelled towards something, otherwise one drifts through life unimpeded.
Bhanggi
Faiqa Mansab
#58. The dusty library air is electric with secrets/ almost palpable in the thick quiet that bounces between/ Cal and those books and me
Stasia Ward Kehoe
#59. A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.
Salman Rushdie
#60. You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel.
George R R Martin
#62. However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.
Helen Dunmore
#63. I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.
Richard Powers
#64. You're my true north. No compass would point me in any other direction but to you.
Kristen Hope Mazzola
#65. It's gonna take me a lot longer than a year without you to get over you.
Estelle Maskame
#66. I had never had a big opinion for myself. I had always thought I'd be a fuck up, that I'd be disappointed like always by life and people. But at this very moment, I knew it. I wasn't a good man, not well-adjusted. - Nolan
Stephanie Witter
#67. I'm a big man, sugar. When I come down on a woman, I want soft, not a bundle of sticks that I might break." - Logan
Cherise Sinclair
#68. I wrote three mysteries and then a contemporary spy novel that was unbelievably derivative - completely based on 'The Conversation,' the movie with Gene Hackman. Amazingly, the character in the book looks exactly like ... Gene Hackman.
Alan Furst
#69. I like all sorts of things, not necessarily just Victorian. Even though I tend to read a lot of Victorian novels, I like a lot of contemporary stuff.
Colin Meloy
#70. All I could think about was the heat of his soft lips, the way they fitted so wonderfully as I was coaxing him to open them some more, just enough to let my tongue slip in and taste him. I needed a taste, needed to complete this fantasy of mine.
Stephanie Witter
#71. On occasion we stumble upon what seems to be a truth. Compared to the surrounding blackness, it sparkles and dazzles our eyes. But are these actually truths? Are our eyes really feasting upon light? Or just patches of grey?
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#72. The novel that's contemporary in the sense of being wholly 'of now' is an impossibility, if only because novels may take years to write, so the 'now' with which they begin will be defunct by the time they're finished.
Graham Swift
#73. Prose of the World is an enormously compelling and vivid study. The result is an ambitious, timely, and eloquent account of the relationship between early-twentieth-century fiction and the contemporary global novel in English.
Rebecca L. Walkowitz
#74. It was his experience that life worked under the same guidelines as a capitalistic society. In order to get what you wanted, it was usually necessary to give up something in return. Sometimes gaining what you defined as everything meant losing what you most needed.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#75. ... The use of your gift for good is your responsibility. You must decide for yourself.
Thomas Sweeney
#76. Stella couldn't believe this was happening. Gavin and Holden were both in her bed and just as desperate for her as she was for them. Her life had morphed into a cross between a romance novel and a porno. If she was dreaming, she didn't ever want to wake up.
Amanda Young
#77. There were many tomorrows to be lived through his children. He could only hope that they would face them more courageously than he had, that his mistakes would serve as warning signs rather than crutches to lean on.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#78. She was magic, a direct light - the kind that seeps through in places that didn't exist inside him anymore. The light he thought he lost forever, but Nick realized we don't lose the light, we absorb it, and with Olivia he wanted to absorb every small speck of it.
Maria La Serra
#79. I closed my eyes and immediately I pictured Brooklyn's full lips parted on a moan, her eyes glassy and her pupils dilated, her cheeks flushed and her body ... her smoking body bared only for me.
Stephanie Witter
#80. How often one reads a contemporary full-length novel and thinks quietly, mutinously, that it would have worked out better at half or a third the length.
Ian McEwan
#81. Quietly, under my breath, I mumbled a name and it wasn't the name of the girl waiting in the other room.
In my mind I pictured Brooklyn's sounds as she came and I jerked in my hand, coming and coming.
Something had to give.
Stephanie Witter
#82. And although he recognized that tenderness was not the same as passion, and certainly not equivalent to love, for now it seemed to him a suitable substitute.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#83. Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society - to help solve our contemporary problems - seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn't this enough? Isn't it a lot?
Jonathan Franzen
