Poetic Fiction Quotes & Sayings

Childhood is a long, long road, from which that dark whispering forest of death seems an impossible destination. — Lauren DeStefano

I remember the lights turning into blurs of blazing fire. I remember the air-conditioning chilling my arms. The smell of coffee smudging into the smell of eucalyptus. — Lucy Christopher

This time as we ascend, I watch the world sinking below us. I watch the way the city fades into sand that gets washed by the ocean. — Lauren DeStefano

Although this is poetic fiction, it contains hidden moral truths worthy of being heeded and understood and imitated, ... — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

He is spent. His mind is mercury again, its brief surge of humanity melting into an oily residue on its surface, and he no longer understands the feelings he felt in that strange moment on the overpass.
But he did feel them. They did happen. They rest on the murky seabed of his mind, buried under sand and silt and miles of grey waves. Patient seeds waiting for light. — Isaac Marion

Your beautiful mouth was moving like a caterpillar. I reached out and tried to catch it. — Lucy Christopher

It radiates out from him like a cloud of ghosts, countless hands clutching at the air, reaching out for ... something. — Isaac Marion

I feel unburdened, and after a while I start to imagine that the divan is a boat moving over the ocean. Sunken cities play music beneath the waves. The ghosts are stirring. — Lauren DeStefano

I watch the ashes swim around like dandelion puffs, making swirls where bodies and walls once stood. — Lauren DeStefano

Fiction is overrated, Fly. We've discussed this. In the time it takes those novelist fuckers to contemplate a few poetic passages, a thousand kids die from malnutrition. Immediacy, man, that's what counts. — Rawi Hage

The dust of thirty years hung lifeless in shafts of morning light, the gilding of perfectly prim pages shone incanescent, the shriek of rolling ladders mourned in perennial soliloquy. — Michelle Franklin

Women have the right to be whatever kind of woman they want to be. Whatever kind of feminist they want to be, or not. I'm a woman writer. Some of my fiction is soft and poetic. Some of my fiction is horrifying and aggressive. My being a woman has no bearing on how I write. Or what I choose to write about. My being a woman is just my gender. It has very little to do with who I am as a person. So don't box me in or tell me how to be GIRL. It's the only thing I've figured out how to do, and I do it my way. — Cheryl Anne Gardner

Bright spots move around him like someone shook the stars from a blanket and they all went flying. — Lauren DeStefano

Then your fingers moved down to my chin. You pushed it up with your thumb to look at me, almost like you were studying me in the artificial lights above my head. And, I mean, you really looked at me ... with eyes like two stars. [ ... ] And I had wings fluttering away inside me all right. Big fat moth wings. You trapped me easily, drew me toward you like I was already in the net. — Lucy Christopher

We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is. — William James

It feels as though we're going in slow motion. I think we'll never get away. But eventually the Ferris wheel is far enough away that it could be a moving constellation. — Lauren DeStefano

Was that - did she just grin at me? To me? A moment of stillness in this moment of pause. Without speaking, we let our gazes wander slow, groping to confirm relief in the other. There's a subdued excitement for the oncoming sharing of whatever's waiting for us behind that heavy iron door, exclusive - two solitary embers, isolated in their separate pits, far away but fanned by the same wind, the same night, alone with the night, their respective camps all gone to sleep, flaring softly cradled calling, out against the great dark backdrop of the great unknown. — Patrick Bryant

There were tiny stars behind my eyelids, a whole galaxy of tiny, spinning stars. — Lucy Christopher

I wipe at her cheeks with the cuff of my green sweater because it's the softest thing I can think of. It catches her tears without absorbing them, and they hang between the fibers like stars. — Lauren DeStefano

It's better to have nothing,' the children were saying. — Marilynne Robinson

The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work. — George Saunders

He rubbed my arm, whispering words that sounded like moth bodies flying into glass windows. — Lauren DeStefano

The sand stretched out gray and ghostlike and illuminated, a column of light leading forward. It was like something a dead person would see, a tunnel leading toward heaven. — Lucy Christopher

It isn't a perfect place. There are no perfect places. But nobody cares about perfection when there are sand castles to build and kites to chase, children that are being born, old hearts that are giving in. — Lauren DeStefano

Once in a while - perhaps every 10 years, or even every generation - a novel appears that profoundly questions the way we look at the world, and at ourselves. Beijing Coma is a poetic examination not just of a country at a defining moment in its history, but of the universal right to remember and to hope. It is, in every sense, a landmark work of fiction — Tash Aw

I didn't want the person standing there, beside the bed, to have the same face I'd found so attractive at the airport. But you were there all right: the blue eyes, blondish hair, and tiny scar. Only you didn't look beautiful this time. Just evil. — Lucy Christopher

Shelby looked over to see Andrew silently mouthing syllables to himself, as if he were part of an ecstatic rite. He grinned as he bit fricatives and tongued plosives. He was tasting English origins, mulling over words ripped from bronze-smelling hoards. Words that had slept beneath centuries of dust and small rain, sharp and bright as scale mail. Poetry had never moved her quite so much as drama. She loved the shock of colloquy, the beat and treble of words doing what they had to on stage. Andrew preferred the echo of poems buried alive. — Bailey Cunningham

I was working the hole with the Sailor and we did not bad fifteen cents on average night boosting the afternoons and short timing the dawn we made out from the land of the free but I was running out of veins. — William S. Burroughs

The months fall to shards at my feet. — Lauren DeStefano

When I call his name, it's a sound almost entirely out of my control. It soars over the crowd and hits him. Even from where I'm standing, I can tell that he recognized my voice. Hastily he unwinds himself from the girl, stands to attention like an animal sensing danger. And I try to call him again, but that word, that name, was all I had the energy for. I barely have the strength left to stand.
I wait helplessly for him to find the sound, and when he does, when his heterochromatic eyes meet mine, my mouth forms the word again, but just barely. The girl at his side disappears. The crowd blurs into senseless shapes and colors. I can't feel my heart or my body or the heat of the flames.
I can only see his face - his bewildered, beautifully familiar face. — Lauren DeStefano

Birds are everywhere in our literature, a part, it seems, of our collective poetic imagination. If writing a beautiful line of poetry fills a poet's heart with joy, imagine how that same poet's soul must take flight at the sight of swallows soaring through the evening sky! — Lynn Thomson

I look at the human sciences as poetic sciences in which there is no objectivity, and I see film as not being objective, and cinema verite as a cinema of lies that depends on the art of telling yourself lies. If you're a good storyteller then the lie is more true than reality, and if you're a bad one, the truth is worse than a half lie. — Jean Rouch

There's this anomaly that happens sometimes with twins. It occurs in the womb when the fetuses are growing too closely to each other. The stronger twin develops normally, while the weaker twin crumples and is encased by the body of the stronger twin, where it becomes a parasite. The result is a single child, plagued by a twin-shaped fossil inside. Like a tumor.
In death Rose became Linden's parasitic twin. They were two separate organisms once, growing steadily beside each other. Two pulses. Two brains. But she has crumpled and died, and still he carries her inside himself. She goes where he goes, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, a shadow behind his ribs. — Lauren DeStefano

The Bible may be an arresting and
poetic work of fiction, but it is not the sort of book you should give
your children to form their morals. — Richard Dawkins

She was supposed to build sand castles on the beach and put her toes in the ocean, Madame says. — Lauren DeStefano

Ty?" I said, trying out your name, liking the way it sounded. "So what's it like anyway? Australia?"
You smiled then, and your whole face changed with it. It kind of lit up, like there were sunbeams coming from inside you.
"You'll find out," you said. — Lucy Christopher

She remembers sprinting over the thin after-waves that slid over each other like sheets of glass. When she ran with the waves it looked like she wasn't moving. When she ran against them it looked like she was flying. She refuses to believe her brother will never know these things. Somewhere, they will find sand. — Isaac Marion

Your eyes were too intense to stare into for long. — Lucy Christopher

Whole life is a search for beauty. But, when the beauty is found inside, the search ends and a beautiful journey begins. — Harshit Walia

I see an ocean that's spilled out of a wineglass, its body clear and sparkling and folding over itself. I see a ribbon of sand. — Lauren DeStefano

There were tiny rainbows in that glass. I turned it so a rainbow danced across my hand. — Lucy Christopher

There are objects made up of two sense elements, one visual, the other auditory - the colour of a sunrise and the distant call of a bird. Other objects are made up of many elements - the sun, the water against the swimmer's chest, the vague quivering pink which one sees when the eyes are closed, the feeling of being swept away by a river or by sleep. These second degree objects can be combined with others; using certain abbreviations, the process is practically an infinite one. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word, a word which in truth forms a poetic object, the creation of the writer. The fact that no one believes that nouns refer to an actual reality means, paradoxically enough, that there is no limit to the numbers of them. — Jorge Luis Borges

The deep blue of your eyes had secrets. I wanted them. — Lucy Christopher

But the nice man had cold eyes. When interacting with his fascinated lady-harem, they had been blue. But when he turned his attention to me - however briefly - I could have sworn that they turned gray, the color of water beneath a sky from which snow will soon fall. — Stephen King

The sun was bobbing on the horizon, just peeking over. Its light shimmered on the sand behind you, making your body look like it was glowing ... like it had a kind of aura. — Lucy Christopher

Far, far away something made a single ghostly howl, like a banshee in the dark. — Lucy Christopher

The windows are empty holes lined with glass teeth. — Isaac Marion

I didn't look back, but I knew you were still watching. It probably sounds weird, but I could just feel it. The hairs on my neck bristled when you blinked. — Lucy Christopher

I wanted so badly to tell him, but something about that entire night seemed so beautiful, so bizarre, that I didn't trust it with my secrets. — Lauren DeStefano

He talks softly, patiently, as I sit on the window ledge and watch boats with colorful triangles for sails scratch the ocean. — Lauren DeStefano

I wrapped my arms around me as tightly as I could, and stared up at the stars. Had I not been so cold and wanting to escape so badly, I could have stared at them forever: They were amazingly beautiful, so dense and bright. My eyes could get lost up there if I left them looking long enough. [ ... ] They swallowed me up. They were like a hundred thousand tiny candles, sending out hope. — Lucy Christopher

It was like I'd stepped out into an afterlife. Only there were no angels. — Lucy Christopher

I thought that it was more likely the opposite. I must have shut grief out. Found it in books. Cried over fiction instead of the truth. The truth was unconfined, unadorned. There was no poetic language to it, no yellow butterflies, no epic floods. There wasn't a town trapped underwater or generations of men with the same name destined to make the same mistakes. The truth was vast enough to drown in. — Nina LaCour

It's been a long time since humans were prey animals. A hundred thousand years or so. But buried deep in our genes the memory remains: the awareness of the gazelle, the instinct of the antelope. The wind whispers through the grass. A shadow flits between the trees. And up speaks the little voice that goes. Shhhh, it's close now. Close. — Rick Yancey

We shall not read it for its sociological insights, which are non-existent, nor as science fiction, because it has a general air of implausibility; but there is one high poetic fancy in the New Atlantis that stays in the mind after all its fancies and inventions have been forgotten. In the New Atlantis, an island kingdom lying in very distant seas, the only commodity of external trade is light: Bacon's own special light, the light of understanding. — Peter Medawar