Novelists From The United States

"How did the other Mechanics miss this? Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe they chose to miss it. Maybe they didn’t see anything that didn’t match their own predetermined theories."

"The hardest part of being in my Guild is having so many rules and restrictions and people telling me what to do. Some of the rules make sense. You can see why they’re necessary. But a lot of other rules feel like they’re just there because someone wanted to control Mechanics who were lower in rank."

"I’m not one of those fools who think that by ignoring reality you can make it go away."

"Sometimes denying reality is all that keeps a person going, isn’t it?"

"He may be a Mage, but he’s also a guy, so he has to have plenty of stuff wrong with him."

"“Should we tell them about these abrasions, or do they already know everything that needs to be known?” The other Mechanic rolled his eyes. “You know the type, I guess. Go through the motions of researching the problem when they’ve already decided what the problem is and what they’re going to do.” “I usually end up having problems with Mechanics like that.” “Don’t we all.”"

"Maybe what this world needs is someone who won’t do whatever they think is necessary to make things be the way they want."

"Experience is a great softener of the mind; it gives knowledge."

"Don't ever dare to take your college as a matter of course,— because like freedom and democracy, many people you'll never know anything about have broken their hearts to get it for you."

"No doubt solitude is wholesome, but so is abstinence after a surfeit. The true life of man is in society."

"To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain."

"But for that blindness which is inseparable from malice, what terrible powers of evil would it possess! Fortunately for the world, its venom, like that of the rattlesnake, when most poisonous, clouds the eye of the reptile, and defeats its aim."

"What we call vice in our neighbor may be nothing less than a crude virtue. To him who knows nothing more of precious stones than he can learn from a daily contemplation of his breastpin, a diamond in the mine must be a very uncompromising sort of stone."

"That Liberty, Which, not the thunder of Bellona's voice, With fleets, and armies, from the British shore, Shall wrest from us."

"The fool is willing to pay for anything but wisdom. No man buys that of which he supposes himself to have an abundance already."

"Ambition is frequently the only refuge which life has left to the denied or mortified affections. We chide at the grasping eye, the daring wing, the soul that seems to thirst for sovereignty only, and know not that the flight of this ambitious bird has been from a bosom or home that is filled with ashes."

"The wonder is not that the world is so easily governed, but that so small a number of persons will suffice for the purpose. There are dead weights in political and legislative bodies as in clocks, and hundreds answer as pulleys who would never do for politicians."

"Gravity is the most practical qualification of the physician."

"The only true source of politeness is consideration."

"It’s like forbidding horses to learn algebra. What’s the point?"

"When men in Congress come to blows at something someone said, I always notice that it shows their blood is quick and red; But if two women disagree, with very little noise, It proves, and this seems strange to me, that women have no poise."

"When the patient is dead, it was the disease killed him, not the Doctor. Dead men tell no tales."

"There, little girl, don't read, You're fond of your books, I know, But Brother might mope If he had no hope Of getting ahead of you. It's dull for a boy who cannot lead. There, little girl, don't read."

"The last place to have a ball, my dear Mrs. DelBelly, is at a formal dance."

"We must love one another, yes, yes, that's all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other."

"He takes satisfaction in having quite lived by his stoic creed: give what you can and take what comes. Concession not freely given is in the end forcibly extracted anyway. For we are all swimmers ephemerally buoyed by what will engulf us at the last; still dreaming of islands though the mainland has been lost; swept remorselessly out to sea while we spread our arms to the beautiful shore."

"Man is vile, I know, but people are wonderful."

"We've got to purge Aristotle from our system." "I've never read him so why do I have to purge him from my system?" "It's proof of his grip on Western Man that he dominates the thinking of people who have never heard of him."

"Or look at it this way. Psychoanalysis is a permanent fad. A vogue here to stay because it tells an old story in a new way. I mean the traditional conflict between flesh and spirit, as viewed by the Christianity now supposedly outmoded, isn't likely to ease up because we have scrapped the notion of sin and now speak instead of the ego and superego between them riding herd on something called the id. It's the same keg of nails any way you open it. "Id" isn't just another big word, either. Far from it."

"Let us hope," I prayed, "that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring."

"Nostalgia, as his Uncle Joshua had said, ain't what it used to be."

"Call me, Ishmael. Feel absolutely free to."

"It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us."

"I now know the answer to the riddle as to which came first, the chicken or the egg? The correct answer is, “Yes.”"

"I got what he was saying. It wasn’t just about crunching numbers. It was about understanding them. It was about seeing the unexpected connections."

"“Let me guess. Las Vegas had time machines as well.” “No,” said Price, “but they had something just as troublesome: the Treasury Department.”"

"College, after all, was a place where one had most of the privileges of adulthood and very few of the responsibilities. Who wouldn’t want to stay there forever if one could?"

"You’ve heard of “Rocks for Jocks,” the gimme course that departments of geology often offer? The physics department offering was called—among the faculty, anyway, “Quarks for Dorks.” Lucky me, I got to teach it."

"“You’re a theoretician. I’m more at home in applied physics.” He reached for his pipe and tobacco pouch. “Ah yes, the great divide in physics. It’s like the nature versus nurture arguments the biologists and psychologists have.” “I wonder what they argue about in the chemistry department,” I wondered. “Probably who has to pick up the check, if they’re anything like the professors I know. If it doesn’t smell or blow up, they seem more interested in mixing drinks than chemicals.”"

"Don’t underestimate the power of nerds with access to Internet search engines."

"There are times when you’re incredibly sensitive and insightful. This isn’t one of them."

"As a journalist, he was used to being lied to."

"The first taste of bread, that day: chunks, chopped from loaves four feet long stacked at the end of the like skis, and it was the best bread I had ever eaten and I knew that forever, as of that noontime, I would be intolerant of the packaged puffy stuff called bread at home."

"WH Auden’s famous observation on the writer MFK Fisher – “I do not know of anyone in the States who writes better prose” – has been pressed into service on the cover of this reprint of Fisher’s most beloved book The Gastronomical Me (1943). The power of the puff lies in the fact that Auden wasn’t praising another poet or even a novelist but a food writer, a species conceived at that time as a domestic science teacher with a fail-safe recipe for . Implicit in Auden’s praise was the suggestion that Fisher should be removed from this category and set alongside Hemingway or Faulkner as a literary practitioner in her own right. These days we would get around the whole vexed business by saying that Fisher’s hybrid of culinary and memoir writing falls into the category of the personal essay, the kind of thing that has launched a thousand blogs and become a staple of the New Yorker’s annual food issue. The only hitch with this is that Fisher – or, to be formal, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher – was on record as hating the idea of the personal essay. To the proud daughter of a California newspaper man, the term signalled self-importance and, worse, over-writing. Fisher prided herself on never doing more than one draft which, if true, means she was a genius. Here she is on the food she encountered in Burgundy as a newlywed in the 1930s ..."

"… Mrs. Fisher herself believes that strolling is a lost art these days, but in fact she is the perfect rambler. A Considerable Town is one long ramble. It rambles through the city, its monuments, its quays, its shops and its cafes, but more important, it rambles through the author's mind and memory—she has known since 1932, and seems to have forgotten nothing. … Mrs. Fisher loves ships, s and s. She likes fresh fish with dry white local wine at lunchtime. She has a susceptible fondness for rogues and vagabonds, and a Dickensian taste for the scramble, the rasp, the blarney and even the petty pretensions of city life. Nobody can describe the sound of bells or the feel of churches better than Mrs. Fisher, and surely nobody in the history of has more exactly defined the pleasures of eating."

"I never set out to be a writer. I write compulsively. I am like a drug addict. I can't help it. I do what pleases me."

"... When I am alone and perhaps a little low, it is good to heat a can of and some milk or water, pour them into a warmed bowl with a sprinkle of in it, and go to bed with it."

"Most of us, unhappily, shudder and ache and rumble as secretly as possible, seeming to feel disgrace in what is but one of the common phenomena of age: the general slowing of all physical processes. For years we hide or ignore our bodily protests and hasten our own dyspeptic doom by trying to eat and drink as we did when we were twenty. When we are past fifty, especially if we have kept up this pathetic pose of youth-at-table, we begin to grow fat. It is then that the blindest of us should beware. Unfortunately, however, we are too used to seeing other people turn heavy in their fifties: we accept paunches and s as a necessary part of growing old. Instead, we should realize this final protest of an overstuffed system, and ease our body's last years by lightening its burden. We should eat sparingly."

"... it's not an accident that the creative imagination is the first thing that's punished when tyrannies take over …"

"We lived for almost three years in , which the s called without any quibble and with only half-hearted contradictions "the gastronomic capital of the world." ... ... We ate s of ten years old under their tight crusts of mildewed butter. We tied napkins under our chins and splashed in great odorous bowls of Écrevisses à la '. We addled our palates with s hung so long they fell from their hooks, to be roasted then on cushions of toast softened with the paste of their rotted innards and fine brandy. In village kitchens we ate hot with and snippets of salt pork in it."