Novelists From The United States

"“When you get to where I am—” “I’ll never get to where you are. I’ll make better choices.” “Choices! You don’t get choices, you get...situations that you react to—the actual cumulative you reacts, with whatever half-ass wiring you’ve got at the time, not some hovering ‘soul.’ You’re a mercury switch—if the spring tilts you to the right degree, you complete a circuit, and if it’s got metal fatigue, it tilts you less, and you don’t. You don’t have free will, sonny.” “Of course I do, of course you do, what kind of excuse—” “Bullshit. If—” The older Marrity was panting. “If a scientist could know every last detail of your physiology and life experiences, he could predict with absolute accuracy every ‘choice’ you’d make in any moral quandary.” Quandary! To Marrity the sentence sounded as if it had been prepared ahead of time. Not for talking to me, he thought, this old wretch couldn’t have anticipated talking to me—he must have cooked it up for his own solace. “Laplace’s determinist manifesto,” came another man’s languid voice from the background. “it overlooks Heisenberg’s uncertainty.” “Okay,” said the older Marrity furiously, “then it’s probability and statistics that dictate what we’ll do! But it’s not—” “It’s a sin,” said Marrity, breathing deeply himself. To Daphne he projected a vague cluster of images—hugging her, holding her hand—and he was able to have more confidence in his reassurance now. “Said the fourth domino to the twenty-first!” exclaimed the older Marrity, laughing angrily. “‘Ah, wilt Thou with predestination round / Enmesh me and impute my fall to sin?’”"

"“We’re going to have a séance. Oren, open the whisky, if you would, and pour each of us a full glass.” “First sensible remark all night,” said Charlotte."

"“That’s me, that old guy, that old drunk guy! Who claimed he was my dad? Like, me from the future?” “One future, not the future. There isn’t any the future.”"

"“Where’s the sane world?” Castine asked as she followed him around to the front of the Saturn. “I used to live there. I think I still have pictures.”"

"“So what do you, you know, do,” she asked, “in Barstow?” Her voice was resolutely light. “Beside talk to ghosts?”"

"Now she was giving him a worried look. “Say something sane.” He smiled bleakly, his eyes on the cars ahead. “You and I are not normal people.” “Huh.” She shook her head. “That’s not sane, that’s just true.”"

"Guesses based on guesses are of no value."

"“I think we’re dead.” “Maybe.” Vickery shook his head. “Would that make a difference?”"

"“Maybe later,” he told her. “Time yet for a hundred indecisions.”"

"Terracotta says people can’t help what they do, any more than a rock rolling down a hill can. The rock might think it has a choice about rolling left or right, just like people think they choose what they do, but really it’s all just physics."

"He fought to think rationally. Guilt, he reminded himself, is an electro-chemical event in the physical brain. It’s one of the useless side-effects of consciousness, which is itself irrelevant. The ideal is the lines in Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall:” “Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.” The important thing was that all of it moved in determinate grooves."

"The terrain is the body, the map is the anatomy chart."

"“‘Allies,’” he explained, “means we agree not to kill each other.” “I knew that,” she said. “It just slipped my mind for a second.”"

"I owe a fortune in student loans, and after I got my degree in education and tried to apply it, I caught on that the emperor had no clothes—"

"“Did he say who he was?” asked Scott. “I asked him,” said Ariel. “He sort of laughed and said he was between names.”"

"“I’d offer you a drink,” he said, “but all I have is the good stuff.”"

"When my mother told me the meek would inherit the earth, I told her all I wanted of it was the shovelful that would cover my cold face."

"“She did love us. Does.” “She loves you the way a drowning person loves somebody they can push down and climb on top of.”"

"“I got to missing her, the way things used to be here, the past. The past,” she repeated. “It’s always out there, isn’t it? I hate now. I hate that whenever you look at a clock, it shows a different time. What’s the use of knowing what time it is, if it’s always changing? And it’s always later!”"

"“Doesn’t she read chicken entrails?” “Oh! No, astrology.” “Same sort of thing.”"

"After a few seconds, he said, “You’re devout, aren’t you? Some species of Christian, I imagine?” She smiled faintly. “Yes.” “I would say that was a mark against your intelligence, but since you’re both nice girls, I won’t say it. But you assume a sequel to this life, one in which noble sacrifices are rewarded, or at least noted. I’m convinced that no note is taken at all, and that, as far as any one of us is concerned, the universe comes to an end at the moment of his death.”"

"“She chose to reject me!” That wasn’t a choice, lad—that was an empty gun saying click.”"

"I’m not a joiner. Any time you work with people, they turn out to be inept clowns."

"“William will marry eventually,” he said in a quieter tone. He’ll try to have children—he doesn’t believe any of this.” “Not even in God,” said Maria sadly, shaking her head, “who is our only hope.” “And an unhelpfully remote and theoretical hope, at that,” Gabriel snapped."

"Lepidopt didn’t know if he was one of those pipe smokers who always had the thing in his mouth and talked around the stem, or one of the ones who was always fiddling with it in his hands, tamping it and relighting it and shoving a pipe cleaner down it; they were different sorts of men."

"“Hey,” Bozzaris said, “nobody’s human.” It was an old Mossad line, a mixture of “nobody’s perfect” and “I’m only human.”"

"He remembered his dismay at finding himself committed to a hand of cards without having honestly looked at the stakes, fourteen years ago. Had he been doing it again? But if the stakes were too frightening to consider, and the game was already lost, what value could there be in clear comprehension?"

"Let us quickly be finished with the business of dying, to save the trouble of making dinner."

"Your skull in gold will be more valuable than others, being solid all through."

"Which perspective is true? he thought. Which do I want to be true?"

"Your policy here, and in all the Arab states, has been to get out as much oil as you could, before the indigenous peoples looked around and noticed that they were living in the twentieth century."

"All wrong. The words seemed in this moment to describe Hale’s whole life."

"White seagulls, luminous in the new daylight, were circling high overhead against the blue of the clean sky, whistling and piping in the open, unechoing air as if calling out the news of the soon-returning spring."

"He wondered if she had actually read his mind or simply knew him well enough to guess his thoughts."

"How, he wondered forlornly, and when, did I become indistinguishable from the bad guys?"

"An angel, maybe, Cochran thought, but one with a harpoon rather than a harp."

"“My wife was a psychiatrist,” remarked Pete, “before she became a bruja.”"

"Cochran recalled that during the French Revolution they had even re-named all the calendar months; the only one he could remember was Thermidor, and he wondered what the others could have been. Fricassee? Jambalaya? Chowder?"

"Bradshaw sighed and swallowed, feeling the volatile coldness in his throat and trying to remember what tequila tasted like. Pepper and turpentine, as far as he could recall."

"“This is very pretty,” said Elizalde... “It’s morbid,” snapped Sullivan. “Burying a bunch of dead bodies, and putting a fancy marker over each one so the survivors will know where to go and cry. What if the markers got rearranged? You’d be weeping over some stranger. Not some stranger, even, some cast-off dead body of a stranger, like a pile of fingernail clippings or old shoes, or the dust from inside an electric razor. What’s the difference between coming out here to think about dead Uncle Irving, and thinking about him in your own living room? Okay, here you can sit on the grass and be only six feet above his inert old body. Would it be better if you could dig a hole, and sit only one foot above it?” He was shaking. “Everybody should be cremated, and the ashes should be tossed in the sea with no fanfare at all.” “It’s a sign of respect,” said Elizalde angrily. “And it’s a real, tangible link. Think of the Shroud of Turin! Where would we be if they had cremated Jesus?” “I don’t know—we’d have the Ashtray of Turin.”"

"It’s important to feel good about yourself. This morning I met somebody I really like—me."

"In the early eighties, savvy Japanese had been scouring Melrose for old leather jackets and jukeboxes, and nervous tourists would drive by to look at the punks with green mohawks; now the funny hairstyles looked as if they’d been done at the Beverly Center. Like a government-subsidized avant-garde, Sullivan had thought as he’d tooled his old van down the crowded avenue, affluent disenfranchisement is just galvanic twitching in a dead frog’s leg."

"Sukie had always said that the Alice books were the Old and New Testaments for ghosts—which Pete had never understood; after all, Lewis Carroll hadn’t been dead yet when he’d written them."

"People in 1900 didn’t think that radium could hurt you, just carrying a chip of it in your pocket like a lucky rock, and then one day their legs fell off and they died of cancer. Not believing something is no help if you turn out to be wrong."

"He thought about crossing his fingers, but clasped her hand instead."

"I’m really willing to try to believe you’re not crazy, but you gotta help me a little, you know?"

"Gambling was the place where statistics and profound human consequences met most nakedly, after all, and cards, even more than dice or the numbers on a roulette wheel, seemed able to define and perhaps even dictate a player’s...luck."

"It wasn’t fair, but fairness was something you had to go get; it wasn’t delivered like the mail."

"He tried to put more conviction into his voice than he felt, and he mentally cursed any God that there might be, for having made this coming ordeal not only tremendously difficult and dangerous, but possibly pointless too."

"She’s probably only now beginning to be able to think for herself, he thought. And she’ll be hating it. Will she acknowledge the responsibilities that she can now clearly see, or will they be so appalling that she’ll just want to return to the selfless haze?"