Novelists From The United States

"“I am not complaining, mind you,” the simurgh was saying in a grumpy, peevish tone of voice a while later, “I was merely pointing out that when one must tamper with the forces of nature, it is better to err on the side of caution and of prudence, than to be too liberal.”"

"“What’s a simurgh?” “A member of the winged species avian simurghi,” sniffed the simurgh. “Easy to identify because of his gorgeous plumage, ready wit, intelligent conversation, amiable disposition, and fabulous abilities.”"

"Mere abstention from a life of evil does not constitute a life devoted to good works."

"You will observe, I think, that repentance is seldom whole-hearted, and generally arises from such base and ignoble motives as feeling sorry for yourself in dire circumstances."

"“Um,” said Kesrick in a small voice, looking remarkably foolish. “Um, indeed!” said Dame Pirouetta tartly. “You will find, dear boy, on these chivalric adventures of yours, that manly courage and fortitude, even when bolstered by the fortunate possession of an enchanted sword such as Dastagerd, are not quite enough: one requires, as well, the use of logic, reason, deduction, and, in a word—intelligence!”"

"However, as one or another of the philosophers has probably noted ere now, the morning was not quite over yet."

"The only thing that mattered was that the quarter century or so he had remaining would be his life, to live out as he chose and in his own best interests. Nothing took precedence over that: not work, not friendships, not relationships with women. Those were all components of his life, and valuable ones, but they did not define it or control it. That was up to him, and him alone. The possibilities, Jeff knew, were endless."

"“Can’t you understand what an important task we’ve been entrusted with?” “By whom, or what? God? This whole experience has made me agree even more with Camus: if there is a God, I despise Him.”"

"Those choice had to be made, Jeff thought He’d learned to accept the potential losses, in the hope that they would be outweighed by the gains. The only certain failure, he knew, and the most grievous, would be never to risk at all."

"This wasn’t “next time,” and there would be no more of that; there was only this time, this sole finite time of whose direction and outcome Jeff knew absolutely nothing. He would not waste, not take for granted, a single moment of it."

"Jon Ive is off the fucking rails and the only person who could rein him in is no longer among the living. ... no way would Steve have ever been so vulgar as to be driven around by a chauffeur in a Bentley, like a modern-day pharaoh. ... Jon Ive is 47 years old, secretly running Apple, and dangerously out of control."

"I still have no desire to own [an Apple Watch], or even any desire to go to the Apple store and look at one or hold one in my hand. ... The only question, it seems to me, is this: At what point can Apple Watch be declared a swing and a miss?"

"People who cover Apple figured this racket out a long time ago, which is that if you become cozy with Apple and never criticize them, they will give you some access."

"I hate to say it but Apple may end up reliving [with iPhone] its nightmare experience in the personal computer market — that is, arriving ahead of everyone else (in 1984) with a device that was really cool and really well built and really showed what the platform could do, but then keeping everything closed and thereby ending up a niche player."

"The Pre represents only a first shot. Rubinstein and his engineers are already preparing a family of devices that will run on the Palm Web OS. Could it be that Apple has staked out an early lead with a breakthrough product only to be passed by others? It's happened before."

"Steve Jobs has created his own precious little walled garden. He's looking more and more like Howard Hughes, holed up in his penthouse, making sure he doesn't come in contact with any germs. Now Google is saying, hey, nice garden, have fun sitting in it. By yourself."

"We had hoped a tablet from Apple would do something new, something we've never seen before. That's not the case. Jobs and his team kept using words like "breakthrough" and "magical," but the iPad is neither."

"Apple's big weakness is its control-freak nature and insistence that there is only one way to make a smart phone. No matter how many carriers sign on to carry the iPhone, in the long run, Apple has again set itself up to be a niche player in smartphones, just as it is in PCs."

"Despite all its bluster about innovation, Apple has become a copycat, and not even a good one."

"Apple might sell a lot of watches to the faithful, and no doubt the bozos will line up outside stores again just because they love to stand outside in lines. Look at me! I'm so techie!"

"The same intact culture that made them good businessmen also made many of them lousy parents."

"When you laugh at something, you don’t fear it anymore."

"True believers aren’t real receptive to the idea that what they’re telling you is just mythology."

"The awful bottom line, of course, is that if you’re going to rule the world, you have to have absolute power, and everybody knows what absolute power does."

"When you hear a story, do you believe only the nice parts? Truth isn’t like a baked fish, where you can eat the flesh and leave the bones and skin. You have to eat it all."

"Has there ever been a revolution that produced something better than what it overthrew? The only thing people learn from being oppressed is how to oppress others!"

"“Like children, they’re bored by complicated things. More than bored: they feel threatened. Give a child mashed potatoes and butter, and he’s happy. He doesn’t want to try the rich sauce with capers, in fact he’ll cry if he’s forced to taste it. You see what I mean? But, listen, Joseph. A child is easy to control. Keep him happy, and he’ll believe what he’s told to believe.”"

"“They find us outlandish,” Lopez admitted. “Extravagant. Eclectic. Unfathomable.”"

"The truth is, Homo sapiens sapiens is pretty much the same the world over, regardless of skin color or technological development. Racists and provincial types have problems with this fact, but it is a fact. All mortals have the same potential, and only chance determines who’s playing a spinet or who’s clubbing dinner to death with a big rock. And, you know what? Mortals adapt to the environment in which they’re placed. Switch babies between savages and technologicals, and nobody notices! I know, because I’ve seen it done. I’ve seen the son of a club-carrying cave dweller fuming because his accounting software wasn’t quite adequate for his needs. All humans have the same brain package."

"I may cut my coat to follow fashion, sir, but not my conscience."

"How could millennia-old superbeings be so boring?"

"“Funny thing about those Middle Ages,” said Joseph. “They just keep coming back. Mortals keep thinking they’re in Modern Times, you know, they get all this neat technology and pass all these humanitarian laws, and then something happens: there’s an economic crisis, or science makes some discovery people can’t deal with. And boom, people go right back to burning Jews and selling pieces of the true Cross. Don’t you ever make the mistake of thinking that mortals want to live in a golden age. They hate thinking.”"

"And what a clever guy this Harpole is, isn’t he? Awfully good at noticing all kinds of little unusual things about people and keeping them on file in his head. So he’s built a theory around us, has he? He added two and two and came up with five, but nobody else in the house was aware there was anything to count."

"“So as we’ve seen, not one faith has ever lived up to its promises. The world has never become a paradise, quite the opposite, in fact: think of the millions upon millions slaughtered, tortured, imprisoned for this great idea, this good news, this revolution. The visionary who works against human nature to impose his—or her—sweeping vision on the world is inevitably its worst enemy. Now, who isn’t? Consider the work of certain individual mortals who set themselves simple tasks. They saw no need to raise armies; they saw no need for revolution or bloodshed; they worked instead for realistic goals with the tools they had. And they succeeded, and their works have been of lasting benefit to humanity.” He erased the board with relish and chalked a new set of names: }}. “People like these have done more to relieve human misery than any prophet with a manifesto ever will.”"

"The leaf that spreads in the sunlight is the only holiness there is. I haven’t found holiness in the faiths of mortals, nor in their music, nor in their dreams: it’s out in the open field, with the green rows looking at the sky. I don’t know what it is, this holiness: but it’s there, and it looks at the sky."

"Imagine being told that it hadn’t mattered whether the Christians or the Moors got Spain! I can still remember my shock. I got over it fairly quickly, though, because by that time I had learned enough history to know that in the long run it never mattered a damn where any particular race of people planted its collective ass."

"Smashing things is the violent way stupid mortal monkeys solve their problems."

"No nation, creed, or race was any better or worse than another; all were flawed, all were equally doomed to suffering, mostly because they couldn’t see that they were all alike. Mortals might have been contemptible, true, but not evil entirely. They did enjoy killing one another and frequently came up with ingenious excuses for doing so on a large scale—religions, economic theories, ethnic pride—but we couldn’t condemn them for it, as it was in their moral natures and they were too stupid to know any better."

"“Why should we obey you?” Budu asked. “Because I’m, er, omnipotent,” said Alec."

"He saw in memory Mendoza’s face, her black eyes sad as she downloaded a chapter on revolutions. Here you go. Great heroes and the things they wrecked. Always easier to destroy something than to create something. It’s harder to plant a garden than to blow up a building, and undoubtedly more boring, but you just might need to do it one day, eh?"

"Edward holds up a hand for silence. “If you please, Captain: he’s thinking. Let us savor the exquisite rarity of the moment.”"

"Edward raises the pointer and places its tip against Alec’s forehead. “What’s the use of having a library in there if you won’t open the books, boy? What’s the good of augmented intelligence if you won’t use it?”"

"“Edward has a purpose for us. Ruling the world, I assume.” “He can’t,” says Alec, aghast. “That’s what villains do!”"

"“That wasn’t very godly,” Alec calls up to him. “And what has God to do with me?” Nicholas shouts back. “No voices speak to me out of any burning bush. No word at all. Hideous vacancy, monstrous indifference, and a senseless universe!” “Well,” says Alec cautiously, “I would think that was a good thing. Shouldn’t you have grown out of this by now? What do you want meaning in the universe for, anyway? Nothing means anything! We’re just here to go along for the adventure.”"

"“Oh, that’s childish,” says Nicholas in disgust. “Well, so what?” says Alec. “We happen to be children.”"

"“Why did I never understand...” “That it was vanity?” I said. “Mm, but so much worse...Delusion. Because, the thing is—human progress begins, not with one lone man with a weapon, however heroic. Nor with subtle governments, be they never so altruistic. It begins with a man and his wife in bed...and...how could I ever hope to govern humanity, without having been even that human?"

"As it had been explained to David long ago, genetic diversity was very, very important. The more diverse the human gene pool was, the better were humanity’s chances of adapting to any new and unexpected conditions it might encounter, now that it was beginning to push outward into Space, to say nothing of surviving any unexpected natural disasters such as polar shifts or meteor strikes on Earth. Unfortunately, humanity had been both unlucky and foolish. Out of the dozens of races that had once lived in the world, only a handful had survived into modern times. Some ancient races had been rendered extinct by war. Some had been simply crowded out, retreating into remote regions and forced to breed amongst themselves, which killed them off with lethal recessives. That had been the bad luck. The foolishness had come when people began to form theories about the process of Evolution. They got it all wrong: most people interpreted the concept of “survival of the fittest” to mean they ought to narrow the gene pool, reducing it in size. So this was done, in genocidal wars and eugenics programs, and how surprised people were when lethal recessives began to occur more frequently! To say nothing of the populations who died in droves when diseases swept through them, because they were all so genetically similar there were none among them with natural immunities."

"That is one dark house your God lives in, man. Alec shook his head. You can keep your Age of Faith. Whyn’t you find somebody to worship who isn’t a shracking psychopath?"

"Justice doesn’t exist! We did worse things. Nobody deserves to go to that place, Alec said. Anyway, weren’t you Christian types supposed to forgive everybody? I will shed no tears for that bastard’s damnation, said Nicholas stonily. No wonder nobody’s left that believes in your stupid religion, said Alec."

"“This is insane,” she said. “Why would mortals make it so difficult to get two little glasses of white wine?” “Human nature, my love.” Edward grinned and set his knee against hers under the tablecloth. “The desire of a few to dictate morality to the whole. And why do the masses submit willingly? Apathy. Or, perhaps, the opportunity to experience the thrill of the forbidden!”"