Novelists From The United States

"“I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis,” he said in low, tight tones. “To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell.”"

"“War does not call for judgment,” I said, “merely survival.”"

"Those who ignore history’s lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them...they may be forced to die by them."

"My own guess is that it’s a myth fueled by the same hunger for superstitious verities that drives other religions."

"Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art."

"It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters."

"There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one’s sense of what is real."

"In such seconds of decision entire futures are made."

"It struck me that his dialect was actually the nondialect of someone who has learned a new language perfectly but without the lazy shortcuts of someone born to it."

"If our society ever opted for Orwell’s Big Brother approach, the instrument of choice for oppression would have to be the credit wake. In a totally noncash economy with only a vestigial barter black market, a person’s activities could be tracked in real time by monitoring the credit wake of his or her universal card. There were strict laws protecting card privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove."

"“How about,” she said, “that you do the logical thing because it’s the logical thing to do?”"

"Listen! There will be no more offerings, neither child nor parent. There will be no more sacrifices for anyone other than our fellow human. The time of obedience and atonement is past."

"After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal (sic) which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil."

"Sol realized what he had known and forgotten about very small communities: they were frequently annoying, always parochial, sometimes prying on a one-to-one level, but never had they subscribed to the vicious legacy of the so-called “public’s right to know.”"

"“I ignore religions,” said Brawne Lamia. “I do not succumb to them.”"

"The story of Rachel’s unique illness was no secret in Crawford, of course. The fact of it had spread through the college the first year of Rachel’s return and the entire town knew soon after. Crawford reacted in the fashion of small towns immemorial—some tongues wagged constantly, some people could not keep the pity and pleasure at someone else’s misfortune out of their voices and gazes—but mostly the community had folded its protective wings around the Weintraub family like an awkward mother bird shielding its young."

"Sarai had treasured every stage of Rachel’s childhood, enjoying the day-to-day normalcy of things; a normalcy which she quietly accepted as the best of life. She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and the triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things—the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossing and connections casual, dialogues imminently (sic) forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal."

"Sol found their tracts the usual combination of double talk and navel lint-gathering common to most religions."

"Another friend, a child psychologist from the college, once commented that Rachel at age five showed the most reliable indicators of true giftedness in a young person: structured curiosity, empathy for others, compassion, and a fierce sense of fair play."

"In the beginning was the Word. In the end...past honor, past life, past caring... In the end will be the Word."

"Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers."

"Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.”"

"Yes, our DNA is unique but so is a salamander’s."

"Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings."

"Belief in one’s identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one’s immortality...and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful."

"In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes."

"The lieutenant took his time scanning their visa chips, letting them wait in the drizzle, occasionally making a comment with the idle arrogance common to such nobodies who have just come into a small bit of power."

"I now understand the need for faith—pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith—as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it."

"This was the Roman Empire's contribution to the world's thought, namely, the solidarity of capital, the oneness of the interests of property irrespective of national boundaries."

"Paul's ... no-work-no-eat doctrine was directed by him only against the poor. All around him were the rich, virginally innocent of toil, and yet who were gorged to the gullet."

"Paul entered upon the path of intellectual sterility when he substituted a delirious mysticism and orgy, for the social enthusiasms which alone should intoxicate the spirit."

"To the Carpenter, with his splendid worldliness, the premier qualification for character was self-respect, and the alertness and mastery of environment which go with self-respect. But to Paul the primate virtue is submissiveness—"the powers that be!" He sought to cure the seditiousness of the working class by drawing off their gaze to a crown of righteousness reserved in heaven for them—a gaseous felicity beyond the stars."

"It was the test of loyal citizenship among the Romans to seek out in every part of the world that which was most rare and valued, and bring it back to Rome as a gift. Thus her sons went forth and returned laden with richest trophies to lay at her feet. They brought to her pearls from India, gold chariots from Babylon, elephants from interior Africa, high-breasted virgins from the Greek isles, Phidian marbles from Athens. Paul also would be a bringer of gifts to the Rome that had honored him and his fathers with the high honor of citizenship. And the gift he would bring and lay at her feet would be the richest of them all—a religion."

"Paul was undeniably sincere. He believed that in reinterpreting the Christian faith so as to make it acceptable to the Romans he was doing that faith a service. His make-up was imperial rather than democratic. Both by birth and training he was unfitted to enter into the working-class consciousness of Galileans. He was in culture a Hellenist, in religion a Pharisee, in citizenship a Roman. From the first strain, Hellenism, he received a bias in the direction of philosophy rather than economics; from the second, his Pharisaism, he received a bias toward aloofness, otherworldliness; and from the third, his Romanism, he received a bias toward political acquiescence and the preservation of the status quo."

"For eighteen years Jesus worked thus as a day labourer. We find him ever afterward identifying himself with the working class. Passages like, "which of you intending to build"; "the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is a householder, which went out early in the morning to hire labourers"; "the burden and heat of the day"; "no man hath hired us"; and the references to the patching of worn garments and hewing down trees for firewood, give evidence of a working-class consciousness."

"Mary knows that within her a child is gestating. For she thereupon composed a song. It is the greatest song in history. This "Magnificat" is the battle-hymn of democracy. Sensing a child within her, Mary feels herself equal to the Roman Empire; and she announces that the days of despotism are numbered. Caesar on his seven-hilled throne may sacrilegiously style himself Augustus, "the divine one." But Mary as confidently disallows him that title. Heaven is not on the side of privilege and oppression, she affirms, but is rather on the side of the trodden. Rome is great, but Galilee with God is greater. In this song three classes of people are objects of Our Lady's invective — "the proud," "the mighty," and "the rich." And she passes upon them a threefold sentence: they are to be "scattered," "put down from their seats," and "sent empty away.""

"Hitherto there had been frequent changes in the tyranny under which, for some four hundred years back, they had lived; and this alternation of masters had kept hope alive. Now there was a sense of permanency in the despotism which, from Antioch as its land base, was bearing down upon them in the trail of the Roman legions. There was an imperious note in the commands of the tribute gatherers, as though an infinite arm of power was now behind the fist which lay at their throat, demanding their goods. Furthermore, all of the tyrannies hitherto had been of the East, Eastern. And though exacting the uttermost farthing of tribute, these despotisms had been gilded with a respect for Asiatic ideals, religion, reverence, a hold-fast in the Unseen. But this new despotism was characterized by a hard materiality, untempered by sentiment of any kind, a race of conquerors self-indulging, heavy-fisted, cynical."

"Jerusalem was the home of the country's aristocracy. Like the local aristocracies in all the other countries of the world, these had lined up with the Romans — were federated with the invader."

"The extension of the Roman "System" to include the Jews, a sturdy mountaineer folk in the hill country of Syria, met there a vehement opposition. And in Galilee, one of the districts of the Jews, the most vehemency of all."

"The tendency of the families of wealth in every country to form a class by themselves, is deep-set in the human makeup. Rome carried the tendency one step further — she cemented the moneyed class in the various countries into an international combine. "Peace and order" were at last secure. An antitoxin against insomnia had been devised. Slave owners could now lay their heads on their pillows at night, without the fear of insurrection gnawing them through the night-watches. An uprising of the toiling masses, no matter how formidable, could be handled. Upon a rebellious district could be mobilized in shortest time six and twenty legions. The machinery of intimidation was complete. Man was undermost, and property paramount. The "Golden Age" — literally — set in. The Roman Empire, that apotheosis of property rights, fastened itself upon the world. Embracing all nations and tongues and climates, a motley crew, they had one cohering principle which swallowed up their diversities — the coherence of a common plunder."

"A measure had been proposed in the Roman Senate to dress slaves in a uniform livery, so as to distinguish them from freemen. It was killed straightway by the argument that this would disclose to the slaves their numerical strength."

"Native oligarchies, living under Rome's protectorate, were moons depending upon their central sun for light."

"Much of the New Testament is the narrative of the coalescence of the native princes with the Roman invader."

"Rome ... did not conquer the nations. She annexed them, by means of a coalition with the local capitalist group in each. ... Wherever the strain between the local privileged class and its proletariat was intense, Rome found natural allies in the former."

"In the countries of the ancient world, even before the formation of the empire, slavery was the basis of society. In each was a capitalist class and a slave class. The capitalists, however, were constantly in fear of slave insurrection. The dread clouded their sunshine by day, and nightmared their sleep; for they saw, piling up against them, a discontent hell-deep and heaven-high."

"The Roman Empire was a world-wide confederation of aristocracies for the perpetuation of human servitude."

"Paul was a stockholder in Rome's world corporation. And that stock by slow degrees had blinded him to the injustice of a social system in whose dividends he himself shared. This explains in large part why he accepted the political status quo, and preached its acceptance by others."

"The Church has as an organized body no sympathy for the masses. It is a sort of fashionable club where the rich are entertained and amused, and where most of the ministers are muzzled by their masters and dare not preach the gospel of the Carpenter of Nazareth."

"This is one of the mutterings which they are muttering today: "The social well-being of the people, the upward movement of the non-propertied or labour classes to material welfare, is continually being obstructed by conceptions of political subserviency and passive obedience to despotic authority, which is directly traceable to Christian doctrine.""

"I’m giving up everything I can’t stand for Lent."