Novelists From The United States

"General Natalie Norwood stood, stretched, and eyed into the empty expanse of the light-blue computer screen built into the top of her desk. The cursor blinked steadily in the lower right-hand corner. It had taken twelve hours of hard work to deal with the seemingly-endless stream of orders, requests, reports, inquiries, memos, interrogatories, and just plain bullshit that went along with command of Confederacy Battle Station Alpha XIV, better known to her six-thousand-plus inhabitants as the Old Lady (plus a host of other less charitable names). And old she was, dating back to before the Human-Hudathan war, having originally been commissioned as a battleship."

"The worst damage was inflicted by powerful energy cannons mounted on Sauron spaceships. Dreadnoughts that measured almost a mile in length, were more than two thousand feet wide, and carried upward of twenty thousand aliens plus the slaves required to support them. Though unable to descend through the atmosphere, the largest battleships had no difficulty firing their weapons from space itself. Earth's atmosphere shrieked in protest each time a bolt of energy tore through the air. Those located within a half mile of the impact experienced a chest-thumping concussion, and if they were fortunate enough to survive, could watch skyscrapers toppple, bridges collapse, and entire neighborhoods erupt into flame. The fires spread to suburbs, grasslands, forests, and jungles. Soon the entire planet was wrapped in a blanket of thick gray smoke."

"She wasn't much over five feet and a hundred pounds, and she looked a little scrawny around the neck and ankles. But that was all right. It was perfectly all right. The good Lord had known just where to put that flesh where it would really do some good."

"There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I've used every one, but there is only one plot—things are not as they seem."

"I kissed her, a long hard kiss. Because baby didn't know it, but baby was dead, and in a way I couldn't have loved her more."

"Life is a bucket of shit with a barbed wire handle."

"Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example."

"Anyone who deprived her of something she wanted deserved what he got."

"What else is there to do but laugh and joke... how else can you bear up under the unbearable?"

"He had made personality a profession, created a career out of selling himself. And he could not stray far, or for long, from his self-made self."

"If I had to marry someone, it wouldn't be a bossy little gal with a tongue like barbed-wire and a mind about as narrow."

"I'd been chasing females all my life, not paying no mind to the fact that whatever's got tail at one end has teeth at the other, and now I was getting chomped."

"There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living."

"What smells good in the store may stink in the stewpot."

"Sure there’s a hell... It is the drab desert where the sun sheds neither warmth nor light and Habit force-feeds senile Desire. It is the place here mortal Want dwells with immortal Necessity, and the night becomes hideous with the groans of one and the ecstatic shrieks of the other. Yes, there is a hell, my boy, and you do not have to dig for it."

"I told her the world was full of nice people. I'd have hated to try to prove it to her, but I said it, anyway."

"They had no hope of anything more, no comprehension that there might be anything more. In a sense they were an autonomous body, functioning within a society which was organized to grind them down. The law did not protect them; for them it was merely an instrument of harassment, a means of moving them on when it was against their interest to move, or detaining them where it was to their disadvantage to stay."

"You’ve got no time at all, but it seems like you’ve got forever. You’ve got nothing to do, but it seems like you’ve got everything…You make coffee and smoke a few cigarettes; and the hands of the clock have gone crazy on you. They haven’t moved hardly, they’ve hardly budged out of the place you last saw them, but they’ve measured off a half? two-thirds? of your life. You’ve got forever, but that’s no time at all."

"You go into the office and take a book or two from the shelves. You read a few lines, like your life depended on reading 'em right. But you know your life doesn't depend on anything that makes sense, and you wonder where in the hell you got the idea it did; and you begin to get sore."

"Then he laughed and she laughed. And quivering with the movement of the train, the dead man seemed to laugh too."

"A weed is a plant out of place. I find a hollyhock in my cornfield, and it’s a weed. I find it in my yard, and it’s a flower."

"We're living in a funny world, kid, a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty."

"If we all had all we wanted to eat, we’d crap too much. We’d have inflation in the toilet paper industry."

"It’s easy as nailing your balls to a stump and falling off backwards."

"When life attains a crisis, man’s focus narrows. [...] The world becomes a stage of immediate concern, swept free of illusion."

"I found out long ago that the place where the law is apt to be abused the most is right around a courthouse."

"There was too much of a sameness about the evening’s delights. He had been the same route too many times. He’d been there before, so double-damned often, and however you traveled—backward, forward, or walking on your hands—you always got to the same place. You got nowhere, in other words, and each trip took a little more out of you."

"That was the way one had to do. To do the best one could, and accept things as they were. Usually, they did not seem so bad after a while; if they were not actually good, then they became so by virtue of the many things that were worse. Almost everything was relatively good. Eating was better than starving, living better than dying."

"He gave them a sardonic grin, the old wicked look they knew he cultivated. “In case the luck of Berneson ends right now, it’s been sheer boredom knowing you two.”"

"He was that kind of man; every now and then you meet a person who is real, who exists as he is rather than within and behind a mask or three, and within a few minutes you’ve been old friends for twenty years."

"In a “barbarian” society (or in any society, in wartime), the conquerors naturally rape ever woman in sight. Not even the stern old lonely god of the children of Abraham frowned on that practice!"

"“How easily you men forget, even when you tell yourselves you are ‘in love,’ whatever idiocy that phrase may convey to your superstitious and romantic little mind!”"

"I always thought Man might have grown up if Freud and Darwin and Havelock Ellis had lived before Napoleon and Watt and Marco Polo. And the schlemiel who invented gunpowder."

"It sounded like a dream. I’d always cherished such a notion: doers conquering parasites and taking over! At the time I left America/Earth—well, skip it. You don’t need me to tell you that those of us who worked and paid taxes were slaves to those who didn’t."

"To call her a strange woman would be to say that Einstein was a bright fellow."

"I’d have been better off of course, just to have gone along, to have accepted. But as I have pointed out I am not built that way. I kept asking why."

"He sees death in the prostitutes who have witnessed the death of honor, and daily multiply the death of love, who bleed away their own lives 50 times a day beneath the relentless stabbings of countless conjugations."

"He sees death in convicted thieves, the burglars, the muggers, the con men, the pimps, a death imposed by law, the gradual death of confinement behind bars."

"He sees it in the juvenile street gangs, who live in fear of death and who propagate fear by inflicting death to banish fear. And he sees it at its worst, as the result of violent emotions bursting into the mind and erupting from the hands."

"They'd taught him how to milk cows, and now they expected him to tame lions."

"To spend his allotted time on earth as a bank teller or an insurance salesman would have seemed an utter waste to Rick. Women, he had reflected had no such problem. Creation had been given to them as a gift and a woman was self-sufficient within her own creative shell. A man needed more which perhaps was one reason why a woman could never understand a man’s concern for the job he had to do."

"A detective sees death in all the various forms at least five times a week."

"It is well to avoid actually recognized myths such as vampirism, reincarnation, etc., and invent one’s own obscure violations of cosmic law. What common myth, for example, does Blackwood use in "The Willows"? Or Chambers in "The Yellow Sign" ? Or Hodgson in The House on the Borderland? These writers create a sort of distinctive awe of their own and manage to say something fresh despite all that has been said before."

"The ambition of Caesar and of Napoleon pales before that which could not rest until it had seized the minds of men and controlled even their unborn thoughts."

"Come and see my rose-coloured bath full of death!"

"Strange is the night where black stars rise, And strange moons circle through the skies, But stranger still is Lost . ...Song of my soul, my voice is dead, Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed Shall dry and die in Lost Carcosa."

"I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with its beautiful stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now trembles before the King In Yellow."

"To come is easy and takes hours; to go is different—and may take centuries."

"When we were younger, me, Marpessa, and the rest of the kids on the block would jet over to Hominy’s house after school, because what could be cooler than watching an hour of Little Rascals with a Little Rascal?"

"You're supposed to wolf whistle! Like this…” Recklessly eyeballing her the whole way, he pursed his lips and let go a wolf whistle so lecherous and libidinous it curled both the white woman's pretty painted toes and the dainty red ribbon in her blond hair. Now it was her turn. And my father stood there, lustful and black, as she just as defiantly not only recklessly eyeballed him back but recklessly rubbed his dick through his pants"