Novelists From The United States

"I said, “I am a soldier, grown old and tired and confused. I have been fighting since before you were born. And I have yet to see anything gained.”"

"You can’t get out of getting old. You can’t get out of having a relationship change."

"Every time I see a mirror I’m amazed. I end up wondering who’s taken over the outside of me. A disgusting old goat, from the look of him. The kind I used to snicker at when I was twenty. He scares me, Stance. He looks like a dying man. I’m trapped inside him, and I’m not ready to go."

"You know you’re getting old when everything aggravates you."

"Bomanz sighed. A man couldn’t get five minutes alone. What the hell did he get married for? Why did any man? You spent the rest of your life doing hard time, doing what other people wanted, not what you wanted."

"Old folks called the winter a harbinger of worse to come. But old folks always see today’s weather as more harsh than that of yore. Or milder. Never, never the same."

"One’s own yesterday is a ghost that will not be laid. Death is the only exorcism."

"Bomanz had lived his lies so long he often lied to himself."

"An old, tired man. That is what I am. What became of the old fire, drive, ambition? There were dreams once upon a time, dreams now all but forgotten. On sad days I dust them off and fondle them nostalgically, with a patronizing wonder at the naivete of the youth who dreamed them."

"You mess with people’s religion and you mess with fire. Even people who don’t much give a damn. Religion is something that gets hammered in early, and never really goes away. And has powers to move which go beyond anything rational."

"I have seen it before. Little people have to hate, have to blame someone for their own inadequacies."

"Simple minds respond to simple answers."

"Nobody knew what the Company wanted. Various witnesses assigned motives according to their own fears. Few came anywhere near the mark."

"Oh, ‘twould be marvelous if the world and its moral questions were like some game board, with plain black players and white, and fixed rules, and nary a shade of grey."

"I do not believe in evil absolute. I have recounted that philosophy in specific in the Annals, and it affects my every observation throughout my tenure as Annalist. I believe in our side and theirs, with the good and evil decided after the fact, by those who survive. Among men you seldom find the good with one standard and the shadow with another."

"My arguments were beginning to sound a little strained to me, too. I was in the position of a priest trying to sell religion."

"How to argue with sociopathic reasoning? Lisa was the heart of Lisa’s universe. Other people existed only to be exploited."

"“Best way out,” Elmo observed laconically, “would be to kill everybody who knows anything, then all of us fall on our swords.” “Sounds a little extreme,” Goblin opined. “But if you want to go first, I’m right behind you.”"

"Shed swallowed. “That isn’t a plan that does much for my nerves.” “Your nerves aren’t my problem, Shed. They’re yours. You lost them. Only you can find them again.”"

"Krage eyed us from a face of stone. “I help you with something, Inquisitor?” “Probably not. You’d lie to me if the truth would save your soul, you bloodsucker.” “Flattery will get you nowhere. What do you want, you parasite?” Tough boy, this Krage. Struck from the same mold as Bullock, but he had drifted into a socially less honored profession. Not much to choose between them I thought. Priest and moneylender."

"The essence of sorcery, even for its nonfraudulent practitioners, is misdirection."

"You try your damnedest, but something always goes wrong. That’s life. If you’re smart, you plan for it."

"It was a day ripped full-grown from the womb of despair."

"Yet every hair on the body is numbered. And in truth, every day is the beautiful day, the last day."

"The stars baked my bones; The oceans culled my blood, And the forests shaped my lungs. Who am I?"

"A good night for the fireplace to be crackling with flames - or so he figured, Crumpling the papers he could only see As testimonials to long plateaus of emptiness."

"Ironically, when it was released in 1979 it was challenged by feminists who thought it was anti-feminist and by anti-feminists who thought it was feminist. I was trying to walk a nice gray line but people who feel strongly about a subject don’t want a gray line. They want it to be all black or all white."

"I cannot remember a time when I did not consider myself a writer."

"I understand the craft of writing, because it’s who and what I am. The commercial world of publishing, both in the past and today, is an ongoing mystery to me. Fads are constantly changing."

"It came naturally. I came from a family of strong women."

"I was in my forties and teaching magazine writing for the Journalism Department at the University of New Mexico. I was hired on a fluke. The professor who was scheduled to teach the course became ill, so the chair of the department, my personal friend Tony Hillerman, asked me to fill in for a semester. Tony knew I’d never been to college and didn’t care; he just knew I’d written successfully for magazines for years. The original professor never returned, and someone else replaced Tony as Chair and automatically kept me on. I discovered I loved teaching writing and started to get worried that my deep dark secret, (no college!) might be discovered, so I began taking courses under my married name, Lois Arquette, hoping I could get a degree before someone “outed” me. In the course of that endeavor, I took a juvenile literature class where they were studying “Lois Duncan books.” My fellow students were excitedly writing A-plus papers about how many of my books were based on Greek myths. I had never even read those myths!"

"Killing Mr. Griffin doesn't encourage violence in schools any more than the story of Cain and Able encourages children to kill their younger brothers."

"I started thinking about charismatic psychopaths like Charles Manson and wondering what they were like as teenagers? They didn't just spring full-blown from oyster shells -- they had to hone the "people skills" that allowed them to become so manipulative as adults. Kids like that are growing up within our school systems and can exert tremendous control over their fellow students. I consider "Griffin" a cautionary tale about the danger of peer pressure."

"The reasons for censorship reflect the social climate of the times. The publisher of Debutante Hill asked me to revise the manuscript because I had a 19-year-old boy (the ‘bad guy’) drink a beer. When I changed the beer to a Coke, the book was published and won the ‘Seventeenth Summer Literary Award.’"

"Violence is a fact of life in today’s society and therefore it has its place in books and films, but I strongly believe that the people who create those books and films have a duty to treat the subject seriously and to show the terrible consequences."

"A movie loosely based upon my novel, I Know What You Did Last Summer, opened in theaters around the country. I was ecstatic until I settled into a theater seat with my box of popcorn and discovered that Hollywood had turned my teenage suspense story into a slasher film. The setting had been changed from the mountains of New Mexico to a fishing village on the East Coast, so an insane fisherman, who wasn't in my book, could decapitate my characters with an ice hook. The first thing I did after leaving the theater was phone our daughter Kerry and warn her not to let the grandchildren see it."

"The subject matter of today's youth novels has no boundaries. The only taboo seems to be sex discrimination... I can only guess about where we're going, but I think we have come about as far as we can in the direction of 'let-it-all-hang-out' realism. My reader-mail indicates that kids are beginning to feel bogged down with so much depressing slice-of-life. My own most successful books have been those that were high in entertainment value, especially those touching on the supernatural."

"The books I loved most as a child were those that contained elements of magic—the whole series of Oz books, Mary Poppins, The Princess and the Goblin—I could name them indefinitely."

"“The problem was that when all you’re trying to do is survive, the universe seems a cold and hostile place. We needed a purpose. To distract us from our awareness of being a single spark of human warmth in an infinite expanse of silence. One small candle in the infinite night of being.” “Do you really think science is purpose enough?” “Yes, I do. I always have. Maybe it’s because I was a lonely kid, and there were times that learning things was all that kept me going. The search for truth is not an unworthy reason to keep going.” “You make it sound so arbitrary.” “Maybe it is. Yet I persist in believing that knowledge is better than ignorance.”"

"She had gone rafting down the Eden. She had faced down the largest animals ever to walk the Earth. She had tended to a dying woman in her final days and nursed an ailing man back to health. She had known tears and laughter, toil, love, sweat, and danger. These were the primal satisfactions, the things that made life matter. What did Washington, D.C., in the twenty-first century have to offer that could compare with them?"

"Still...the greatest adventure of her life was over and done for. She had returned from Never-Never Land, from Middle-earth, from El Dorado. The dragons were slain, the treasures dug up and hauled away in wagons, the swords and bright banners packed in trunks and stowed in the attic. Nothing she ever did would be as vivid and meaningful again."

"Second chances were so rare in this world to be almost miracles."

"In some ways she was not a very good scientist: impatient with data, too ready to leap to conclusions, apt to judge an idea not by its merits but by its sheer niftiness."

"It was classic cult behavior: the charismatic leader whose word was law, the unreasoning obedience, the pervasive fear."

"He’s just an ambitious young beta male with delusion of alphahood. He wants power and double rations, is all. This whole thing stinks of primate politics."

"It was a terrible blessing she’d been given, to see herself the way everybody else did."

"“That’s impossible.” “Only to small minds,” Gertrude said."

"“Your system works fine in theory. But things are different in the real world.” ”I’m going to move to Theory some day,” Chuck said. “Everything works there.”"

"She was one of those people who discredited their own ideas by the force with which they argued them."

"“It’s inspired lunacy,” Leyster agreed. Chuck looked crestfallen. “Right up there with continental drift, or the notion that birds might be descended from dinosaurs.” Chuck brightened. “But it’s also right up there with Eric Van Danniken and Lamarckian genetics. Until we’ve tested it out, it’s just a nifty hypothesis, no more.”"