Novelists From The United States

"[She plays the role with] a piteously flimsy little twist of juvenile greed, inhibitions, physical yearnings, common crudities and conceits."

"As I understand it, George Peppard later became a nice guy, a gentleman, but when we worked together back then, he was pretentious, egotistical, a brat, and an asshole—and that’s just for starters! He pretended he was seven years younger than he was; he even claimed to be a bachelor and denied he was married—in front of me (I knew better), he denied their existence. The role of Jonas Cord in The Carpetbaggers really went to his big head. He acquired delusions of grandeur—thought he was God’s gift to women and the movies! His attitude towards me was very bizarre—he acted as though we’d never met! Or that I had a husband!"

"Joe Levine behaved like he owned me. My husband thought it was all terrific as long as I kept bringing in the money. I started objecting to everything, but it was too late. The sex-symbol image had already started. I turned down parts and they blacklisted me. The press attacked me viciously at every opportunity. I came very close to suicide."

"Life seems to be a never-ending series of survivals, doesn't it?"

"And even if I fail—this is always the archivist’s consolation—perhaps I will have laid a foundation for someone wiser."

"Belasco gave me a frank look. “A market in the Bay Area needs, at minimum, three things. It needs fancy coffee, weird honey, and sourdough bread.”"

"The Internet: always proving that you’re not quite as special as you suspected."

"“You know, old books are a big problem for us. Old knowledge in general. We call it OK. Old knowledge, OK. Did you know that ninety-five percent of the internet was only created in the last five years? But we know that when it comes to all human knowledge, the ratio is just the opposite—in fact, OK accounts for most things that most people know, and have ever known.”... “So where is it, right? Where’s the OK? Well, it’s in old books, for one thing...—and it’s also in people’s heads, a lot of traditional knowledge, that’s what we call TK. OK and TK.” He’s drawing little overlapping blobs, labeling them with acronyms. “Imagine if we could make all that OK/TK available all the time, to everyone. On the web, on your phone. No question would go unanswered ever again.”"

"The buzz about Google these days is that it’s like America itself: still the biggest game in town, but inevitably and irrevocably on the decline. Both are superpowers with unmatched resources, but both are faced with fast-growing rivals, and both will eventually be eclipsed. For America, that rival is China; for Google, it’s Facebook...But here’s the difference: staring down the inevitable, American pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever the hell they want."

"After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this: A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time."

"Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in."

"There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care."

"Thank you,Teobaldo You are my greatest friend This has been the key to everything"

"I feel a little whirl of dislocation—the trademark sensation of the world being more closely knit together than you expected."

"“We believe that when this secret is finally unlocked, every member of the Unbroken Spine who ever lived...will live again.” A Messiah, a first disciple, and a rapture. Check, check, and double-check. Penumbra is, right now, teetering right on the boundary between charmingly weird old guy and disturbingly weird old guy. Two things tip the scales toward charm: First, his wry smile, which is not the smile of the disturbed, and micromuscles don’t lie. Second, the look in Kat’s eyes. She’s enthralled. I guess people believe weirder things than this, right? Presidents and popes believe weirder things than this."

"He has the strangest expression on his face—the emotive equivalent of 404"

"New England is about right. And the Pacific Coast would make a nice, other Italy. But as for the rest of the country, I honestly don't know what to do with it. Do you?"

"When liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals won't do."

"An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein - and the replacement of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans."

"At the very beginning of the first Trump presidency, back in 2017, I posted on Twitter the following thought: “Regular reminder that Donald Trump’s core competency is not dealmaking with powerful counter-parties. It is duping gullible victims.”"

"Anti-Semitism itself is a conspiracy theory... Anti-Semitism differs in this respect from racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and homophobia. Those other bigotries are founded on contempt. Anti-Semitism, like all forms of conspiracism, is founded on paranoia. Which is why people who start down any conspiracy-seeking path so often arrive at anti-Semitism. The pull is hard to resist, because the idea of Jews as arch-manipulators is such a powerful cultural resource."

"If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy."

"The thing to fear from the Trump presidency is not the bold overthrow of the Constitution, but the stealthy paralysis of governance; not the open defiance of law, but an accumulating subversion of norms; not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters. Trump operates not by strategy, but by instinct. His great skill is to sniff his opponents' vulnerabilities: "low energy", "little", "crooked", "fake". In the same way, Trump has intuited the weak points in the American political system and in American political culture. Trump gambled that Americans resent each other's differences more than they cherish their shared democracy. So far, that gamble has paid off."

"As President Trump is cruel, vengeful, egoistic, ignorant, lazy, avaricious, and treacherous, so we must be kind, forgiving, responsible, informed, hardworking, generous, and patriotic."

"When you just look at the map of American elections, I mean, barring some truly extraordinary event that utterly destroys the credibility of the incumbent presidential party, it’s very hard to see that Donald Trump, who is so unacceptable to so many groups in American society, can beat Hillary Clinton."

"My dear and unfortunate successor: I shall conclude my account as rapidly as possible, since you must draw from it vital information if we are both to — ah, to survive, at least, and to survive in a state of goodness and mercy. There is survival and survival, the historian learns to his grief. The very worst impulses of humankind can survive generations, centuries, even millennia. And the best of our individual efforts can die with us at the end of a single lifetime."

"I’ve always been interested in foreign relations. It’s my belief that the study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present, rather than an escape from it."

"It was strange, I reflected, as we went out into the golden evening of the Byzantine streets, that even in the weirdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one’s life, the greatest divides from home and familiarity, there were these moments of undeniable joy."

"It is a fact that we historians are interested in what is partly a reflection of ourselves, perhaps a part of ourselves we would rather not examine except through the medium of scholarship; it is also true that as we steep ourselves in our interests, they become more and more a part of us. Visiting an American university — not mine — several years after this, I was introduced to one of the first of the great American historians of Nazi Germany. He lived in a comfortable house at the edge of the campus, where he collected not only books on his topic but also the official china of the Third Reich. His dogs, two enormous German shepherds, patrolled the front yard day and night. Over drinks with other faculty members in his living room, he told me in no uncertain terms how he despised Hitler’s crimes and wanted to expose them in the greatest possible detail to the civilized world. I left the party early, walking carefully past those big dogs, unable to shake my revulsion."

"Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light."

"In the Year of Our Lord 1456 Drakula did many terrible and curious things. When he was appointed Lord in Wallachia, he had all the young boys burned who came to his land to learn the language, four hundred of them. He had a large family impaled and many of his people buried naked up to the navel and shot at. Some he had roasted and then flayed. There was a footnote, too, at the bottom of the first page. The typeface of the note was so fine that I almost missed it. Looking more closely, I realized it was a commentary on the word impaled. Vlad Tepes, it claimed, had learned this form of torture from the Ottomans. Impalement of the sort he practiced involved the penetration of the body with a sharpened wooden stake, usually through the anus or genitals upward, so that the stake sometimes emerged through the mouth and sometimes through the head. I tried for a minute not to see these words; then I tried for several minutes to forget them, with the book shut. The thing that most haunted me that day, however, as I closed my notebook and put my coat on to go home, was not my ghostly image of Dracula, or the description of impalement, but the fact that these things had — apparently — actually occurred. If I listened too closely, I thought, I would hear the screams of the boys, of the “large family” dying together. For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history’s terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth. And once you’ve seen that truth — really seen it — you can’t look away."

"Life’s better, sounder, when we don’t brood unnecessarily on horrors. As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination."

"As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claw."

"Dracula is a metaphor for the evil that is so hard to undo in history."

"She projected an air of righteousness that can only come from someone who hasn’t even finished her third decade."

"Here’s the thing about constant surveillance—the question you must ask yourself is not “Am I being overheard?” but “Is anybody paying attention to me?”"

"Then let my skeleton soulWrithe upward from its loam,Drink red morning again,And look gently home."

"The probing knife of madnessCan start a dullard brain;Cold cheeks feel kissesAnd warm with tears again"

"For he has seen a road by healing watersHushed into wintry slate against the sand,And spoken there with the wind's elfin daughters,And mingled in their dusty saraband.He has known winds that blow from blossomy closes,Rich with the fruity smell of summertide,And kissed warm faery lips... Now he reposes,While we are not quite certain he has died."

"Then no soft arms could hold me from my wilderness To reap at daylight's fallow edge, with bullet or knife,That flicker of hoof or pelt, that flash of wings returning -The dogs trace it - harvest of life that gives me life."

"This is an autumn when they come no more.Beech leaves yellow and fall, the beech-mast rotsUneaten. Infertile now the beechHollows its heart, begetting naught.There is frost on the grandson's eyes,And only rumor upon the skies..."

"Father remembered the wild pigeons crowdingBeech groves, mast-rich. The flutter in boughs, the cloudDarkening all, a hurricane circling and surging.Eye lost count, ear could not measure sound.Mind hurled measureless with them, feathered the sky."

"The sky drips its spectral And Gods, like men, to soot revert.Gone is the mild, the serene air.The golden years are come too late.Pursue not wisdom or virtue here,But what blind motion, what dim lastRegret of men who slew their pastRaised up this bribe against their fate."

"Something stirs that once had life. It dropsInto the stream, a last act of faith.Seedballs of sycamore, incautious leaves of willow,These have outstayed their autumn, teasing deathOnly so far, not yet beyond all patience.Now they let go."

"We, too, have names that blaze on mouldering stoneAnd I have seen men's tears fall where they sleptAnd heard a shouting while I wept,A century off yet louder in my earThan all that's so much magnified and near."

"We mourned with you then in brotherhood,And I'll weep with you now for those whose namesBurn on your monuments like altar flames."

"The whispering in the marrow spreads to the brain;The remembering heart carries it round againTill it beats in the throat, the lips, the weeping eyeAnd is born at last in a blazing wordless outcry."

"Farewell,Army of Tennessee! Rough glory, rooted here,Feeds the lone vow, the lingering touchOf a late comrade sworn to remember you!Lights glow from river and town. The darkness stabs.And winter sweeps the undefended earth."

"The seed of Appomattox blooms; its fruitRots where eyes are dazed with a hungry searching,And ears are deaf with steps that murmur and followNo command."

"Why did my father write? I know he sawHistory clutched as a wraith out of blowing mistWhere tongues are loud, and a glut of little soulsLaps at the too much blood and the burning house."