Novelists From The United States

"I don’t like eating in the dark. Dimly lit restaurants always make me think they’re trying to hide the food."

"“How are you on the high wire?” “Wire walking? It’s simple. Any child of ten can do it—with about fourteen years practice."

"“A curious mixture, you,” I said, pulling her firmly toward me over the bowl of cement and commencing a lengthy kiss of agreement, exploration, adoration and lust."

"The trains take us anywhere we want on earth. They’re very fast and dependable. If I remember from history we tried personal mechanical vehicles for a short time, but gave them up as a bad idea. They smell up the road, take up too much room, caused many accidents and just proved a general nuisance."

"“God is just,” he said. “Just what?” I asked. “Just watching.”"

"“Well, what that means is that it doesn’t happen very often. Now it’s happened to one small group of people—us—twice in a short time. That would seem to indicate that,” he ticked a finger, “something’s seriously out of whack in general, or,” he ticked the next finger, “someone’s out to get us in particular; which I feel is quite unlikely. At times in my paranoid past I would have assumed that the Universe is teaming up to get me, but now I’m more objective and I don’t believe that. I think it, but I don’t believe it.”"

"I am not in the habit of letting someone else decide what I can and cannot do."

"“A lot of things seem to be happening, all at once,” I told Chester. “Enemy action,” he replied. “Huh?” “That’s what you told me once. An old Army motto you found when you were doing those war books. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. This is the third time.”"

"“You’re from Liverpool, of course,” He was very proud of his ability to place different accents. “No,” Sylvia told him. “Boston.”"

"He went out of the office into the darkness of the long corridor and walked heavily into the sunlight, into the open world that was like a prison wherever he turned."

"... he could not bring himself to hate the Germans. But the Germans were there to be hated."

"Sometimes he stood in the center of the quad, looking at the five huge columns in front of Jesse Hall that thrust upward into the night out of the cool grass. ... Grayish silver in the moonlight, bare and pure, they seemed to him to represent the way of life he had embraced, as a temple represents a god."

"The class had read two plays by Shakespeare and was ending the week with a study of the sonnets. The students were edgy and puzzled, half frightened at the tension growing between themselves and the slouching figure that regarded them from behind the lectern. Sloane had read aloud to them the seventy-third sonnet; his eyes roved about the room and his lips tightened into a humorless smile. ... ... Someone coughed. Sloane turned his dark bright eyes upon Stoner. "Mr. Stoner, what does the sonnet mean?" ... In a moment of silence, someone cleared his throat. Sloane repeated the lines ... Sloane's eyes came back to William Stoner, and he said dryly, "Mr. Shakespeare speaks to you across three hundred years, Mr. Stoner, do you hear him?" ... Stoner's eyes lifted slowly and reluctantly. "It means," he said, and with a small movement raised his hands up toward the air; he felt his eyes glaze over as they sought the figure of Archer Sloane. "It means," he said again, and could not finish what he had begun to say."

"Do not tempt us with the poet's twisted pride. Here is the double fact that we must grasp— The sea is lonely and the land is wide."

"A necessary strategy of literary criticism is to propose problems, and a necessary illusion is that those problems can be solved. But the problems and solutions are more often than not celebrations of the literature they address and gestures that would bring us closer to a past that is forever receding from us. The force of literature is at last magical, and the mysteries that we try to solve are the validations of its power."

"‘Dear God,’ she prayed, ‘let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.’"

"It made sense, to the New York Daily News sports editor, that these guys dominated basketball. After all, “the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smartalecness,” not to mention their “God-given better balance and speed.” He was referring, of course, to the Jews. In the 1930s, Paul Gallico was trying to explain away Jewish dominance of basketball. He came up with the idea that the game’s structure simply appealed to the immutable traits of wily Hebrews and their scheming minds. It sounds strange to the ear now, but only because our stereotypes about who is inherently good at particular sports have shifted. His theory is not any more or less insightful now than it was then; his confidence should remind us to be skeptical of similar, supposedly explanatory arguments that abound today."

"No one can be as calculatedly rude as the British, which amazes Americans, who do not understand studied insult and can only offer abuse as a substitute."

"Seventy-two thousand of the flock stand prepared to break the Sabbath this coming Sunday. Break it? Nay, destroy, shatter utterly with screams of pleasure as they observe a large vulgar person, himself a confessed glutton, propel a sphere an unholy distance. Old Nick rides on Ruth's bat, else how could he smite the ball so far beyond the power of ordinary man? He is in league. Forbid the games. Cast this Ruth out into utter darkness. He creates joy annually for millions."

"It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book...What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other."

"...the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June."

"He makes her think sometimes of a mouse singing amorous ballads under the window of a giantess."

"The woman's head quickly withdraws, the door to the trailer closes again, but she leaves behind her an unmistakable sense of watchful remonstrance, as if an angel had briefly touched the surface of the world with one sandaled foot, asked if there was any trouble and, being told all was well, had resumed her place in the ether with skeptical gravity, having reminded the children of earth that they are just barely trusted to manage their own business, and that further carelessness will not go unremarked."

"Why doesn't she feel more somber about Richard's perversely simultaneous good fortune ("an anguished, prophetic voice in American letters") and his decline ("You have no T-cells at all, none that we can detect")? What is wrong with her? She loves Richard, she thinks of him constantly, but she perhaps loves the day slightly more."

"I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been."

"What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run."

"A celestial light appeared to Barrett Meeks in the sky over Central Park, four days after Barrett had been mauled, once again, by love. It was by no means his first romantic dropkick, but it was the first to have been conveyed by way of a five-line text, the fifth line of which was a crushingly corporate wish for good luck in the future, followed by three lowercase xxx’s."

"We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds & expectations, to burst open & give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so."

"...Virginia lingers another moment beside the dead bird in its circle of roses. It could be a kind of hat. It could be the missing link between millinery and death."

"“You are settling in?” he said. “Your rooms are sufficient; the fire is lit, the floors swept; all ets are ceteraed?”"

"The thought flashed that this was what taking chances was—you always thought in the back of your mind that doing the right thing would lead you down the right path to the right outcome. But when it came down to it, you might still fail, and everything might end in disaster. Faith in your decision did not mean that the best was going to happen."

"“The guests will arrive soon,” he said, as lightly as if they had been only talking about the weather. “For this tedious chore we call a ‘party.’ We pronounce mingling with uninspired souls ‘charming,’ and talking of unimportant topics ‘delightful.’ Oh, I despise it.”"

"Jane nodded, and she mentally thanked the several-greats-grandmother who had decided she’d rather risk royal displeasure than give up a book."

"Anything that lives forever gets bored."

"Dorie smiled sideways up at her in the manner of children everywhere when they’d gotten away with something."

"It was weird being lonesome in a place full of people."

"I remembered what Jamie had said, that love doesn't solve anything. Maybe. But it helps."

"Mace," I said, struck by a thought, "did you ever think that all those people in those cars have a whole separate story to them, that it's just as important to them as our stuff is to us, and we don't know anything about it. Maybe sometime we'll run across somebody and two years ago they were driving past us on the highway and we never knew it. Like sometimes we meet people and bump off of them and never see them again and we never know why paths cross."

"Rejection is nature's way of telling you to write a better book."

"I have final say on the plot and characters, she has final say on the words and descriptions."

"This is my little disquisition about football: the quarterback, the center, and the towel. p. 116"

"Here, on the other hand, with an ingenuity that should take an entrepreneurial schemer’s breath away, there has evolved the following proposition: that a legal job no sooner comes into existence than it generates, immediately and of necessity, a job for a competitor. p. 118"

"But we do not normally mistake progressions of weakness, the loss of the simple capacity to escape, for the onset of love. p. 17"

"(What immigrant fiction has been the most important to you, both personally and as an inspiration for your own writing?) I don’t know what to make of the term “immigrant fiction.” Writers have always tended to write about the worlds they come from. And it just so happens that many writers originate from different parts of the world than the ones they end up living in, either by choice or by necessity or by circumstance, and therefore, write about those experiences. If certain books are to be termed immigrant fiction, what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn’t agree with me. Given the history of the United States, all American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction. Hawthorne writes about immigrants. So does Willa Cather. From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme."

"I'm amazed at how fast the interest has grown in writing in English by writers of South Asian origin, whether they're living in India, living in South Asia, or they are expatriate writers living here or immigrant American writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and me. The size of the community of such writers and the body of work produced has happened so fast."

"Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do."

"Books come to stand for various episodes in our lives, for certain idealisms, follies of belief, moments of love. Along the way they accumulate our marks, our stains, our innocent abuses—they come to wear our experience of them on their covers and bindings like wrinkles on our skin."

"yet I know that expressing oneself necessarily means being different. The writer's voice is a singular one, solitary. Art is nothing other than the freedom to express oneself in any language, in whatever manner, dressed any which way."

"My grandfather always says that's what books are for," Ashoke said, using the opportunity to open the volume in his hands. “To travel without moving an inch."

"for Catholic writers, you must also think of James Farrell...And what about this guy Powers who writes about priests all the time? Those are great stories."