Novelists From The United States

"You don't forget the face of the person who was your last hope."

""I want the audience to recognize you when you're in the arena," says Cinna dreamily. "Katniss, the girl who was on fire." It crosses my mind that Cinna's calm and normal demeanor masks a complete madman."

""So you're supposed to give us some advice", I say to Haymitch. "Here's some advice. Stay Alive," says Haymitch and bursts out laughing."

"Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don't expect it because I don’t think of District 12 as a place that cares about me. But a shift has occurred since I stepped up to take Prim's place, and now it seems I have become someone precious. At first one, then another, then almost every member of the crowd touches the three middle fingers of their left hand to their lips and holds it out to me. It is an old and rarely used gesture of our district, occasionally seen at funerals. It means thanks, it means admiration, it means good-bye to someone you love."

"So I learned to hold my tongue and to turn my features into an indifferent mask so that no one could ever read my thoughts."

"She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother. Of course, she did. This is the day of the reaping."

"Winning means fame and fortune. Losing means certain death. The Hunger Games have begun."

"Gregor turned on the television and flipped through the channels. He stopped at the news. A bomb had blown up in a marketplace somewhere, killing forty-nine. There were body parts and smoke and relatives wailing. The next story was about refugees dying on the road, driven from their homes by an enemy army. The news anchor was just starting to show a grainy video of a soldier who had been taken hostage when his mother reached in and switched off the television. She looked so sad. "I think you've seen enough, Gregor." It had all looked pretty familiar. The bodies, the fear, the desperation. These things had always been here in the Overland, he supposed, but he had never really paid any attention to them until now."

"If you think back, my comments were very open to interpretation. And you happen to be easily misled. As for the queen, who is difficult to lead anywhere... I have always been and intend to be entirely straightforward."

"So, what brings the Children's Crusade into the Firelands? I don't flatter myself you were looking for me." "We got lost on a picnic."

"I thought I detected in you a sense of fair play. Most dangerous in the Underland, boy."

"You know, where I come from, we don't think much of someone who sneaks up and stabs a person in their sleep."

"Luxa and I do not serve food, we are royalty." "Yeah, well, I'm the warrior and Boots is a princess. And you two are going to get pretty hungry if you're waiting for me to serve you." "Tell him, boy. Tell him your country fought a war so you wouldn't have to answer to kings and queens."

"BEWARE UNDERLANDERS, TIME HANGS BY A THREAD, THE HUNTERS ARE HUNTED, WHITE WATER RUNS RED. THE GNAWERS WILL STRIKE TO EXTINGUISH THE REST. THE HOPE OF THE HOPELESS RESIDES IN A QUEST."

"“In our world, I rank music somewhere between hair ribbons and rainbows in terms of usefulness.”"

"The Hunger Games is a reality television program. An extreme one, but that's what it is. And while I think some of those shows can succeed on different levels, there's also the voyeuristic thrill, watching people being humiliated or brought to tears or suffering physically. And that's what I find very disturbing. There's this potential for desensitizing the audience so that when they see real tragedy playing out on the news, it doesn't have the impact it should. It all just blurs into one program. And I think it's very important not just for young people, but for adults to make sure they're making the distinction. Because the young soldier's dying in the war in Iraq, it's not going to end at the commercial break. It's not something fabricated, it's not a game. It's your life."

"Life is incredibly short, yet we're always told that change takes time. For a race of mortals, dicking around just isn't acceptable."

"Later Julian would give me another book he had culled from among the Archival duplicates, a short novel called The Time Machine by Mr. H. G. Wells, about a marvelous but apparently imaginary cart which carried a man into the future—and it fascinated me—but the Archive itself was a Time Machine in everything but name. Here were voices preserved on browning paper like pressed flowers, whispering apostasies into the ear of a new century."

"“It’s complicated, Jesse. There’s the official story. There’s the real story. And there’s the conspiracy theory.” “Tell me the real story.” “I would, but I don’t know what it is.” “Well, then what’s the official story? And who declared it official?”"

"Not all idealism is fake."

"“Baumgartner’s coke habit isn’t the secret she thinks it is, and it gives us leverage.” “Coke?” “Coke, yeah, you know: cocaine. When she powders her nose, she literally powders her nose.”"

"Violence is the great attractor of human history, Dr. Iverson. A force almost as irresistible as gravity."

"His sympathy (that is, for a caterpillar parasitized by a wasp) was an anthropomorphism, a projection. The caterpillar was hardly more than a protein engine enacting a suite of encoded behaviors. A meat robot. As am I, except that in the case of Ethan’s species evolution had conjured a knowing self out of chemistry and contingency. I feel, therefore I abhor."

"What is intelligence, exactly? Maybe that sounds like a simple question. We know—or think we know—what our own kind of intelligence is like. After all, we experience it on a daily basis. But there are other kinds of intelligence. There is the intelligence of the hive—the complex behavior that arises from individually unintelligent organisms following a few simple behavioral rules in response to cues from the environment. And there is a kind of intelligence that inheres in the ecosystem as a whole. Evolution, over time, has created entities as diverse as crinoids and mushrooms and harbor seals and howler monkeys, all without a predetermined goal and without devoting even a moment of thought to the subject. You might even conclude that this kind of thoughtless intelligence is more powerful and patient than our own."

"And the question she found herself asking now that Leo was asleep beside her was: had she fallen in love? Because that was how it felt. But only a few minutes ago her body had exploded into an orgasm so intense that it probably registered on the Richter scale, so maybe her judgment wasn’t entirely unbiased."

"“Even if you could talk to it, you wouldn’t learn anything. All it would tell you is what it wanted you to hear. Or no, not even what it wants you to hear; it would generate words that in some kind of model of possible outcomes produce a result that enhances the likelihood of its reproductive success.” “I do that too,” Leo said. “From time to time.” Smiling. “Smartass,” Cassie said."

"The only reason you can’t see how crazy this is is because we’ve been neck-deep in crazy for years."

"All the pious high-school bullshit about the Century of Peace had been revealed for what it was: as artificial as a plastic nativity scene and as hollow as a split piñata. The world was peaceful the way a drunken coed passed out at a frat party was peaceful: it was the peace that facilitated the fucking."

"“What are you saying, you think he’s completely sane?” “No. But I’m not sure any of us rises to that standard.”"

"“So are they some form of life, or are they machines?” “At the chemical level all living things can be construed as machines.”"

"“So we can trust each other.” “It’s the rest of the world we can’t be sure about.”"

"Life shites on hope."

"Reproduction, Nerissa thought: Ethan had once called it the blade of evolution. There was no intelligence in evolution, only the cutting-board logic of selective reproduction. She envisioned the work of evolution as a kind of blind, inarticulate poetry. We are the was it Charles Darwin had said? From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved…There is grandeur in this view of life. Grandeur or horror. The idea that all the kaleidoscopic strangeness of biological systems could unfold without guidance or motivation was almost too unsettling to accept."

"Cassie had seen pictures in textbooks, of ranks of men in brown uniforms with rifles slung over their shoulders: the Allied Expeditionary Force, off to join the battered Brits and French. And pictures of the muddy European trenches: Ypres, Passchendaele, the Marne, where countless young men had been slaughtered by other young men as bewildered and obedient as themselves."

"Ris, it can’t tell the truth—it can’t distinguish between truth and lies. You know that. It uses words to manipulate people."

"And the hypercolony would lie. More precisely, it would say whatever advanced its interests. The distinction between truth and falsehood was irrelevant to the hypercolony, perhaps even imperceptible to it. It generated human language solely for the purpose of manipulating human behavior."

"There was no mind in back of those words, Ethan reminded himself. Nothing but a series of highly-evolved algorithms aimed as achieving a strategic result. Engaging in dialogue with such a creature was no more useful than trying to fend off a scorpion by quoting Voltaire."

"What is inevitable is not death but change. Change is the only abiding reality. The metaverse evolves, fractally and forever. Saints become sinners, sinners become saints. Dust becomes men, men become gods, gods become dust."

"From this new point of view, the universe I had inhabited became an object I could perceive in its entirety. It was a hypersphere embedded in a cloud of alternative states—the sum of all possible quantum trajectories from the big bang to the decay of matter. “Reality”—history as we had known or inferred it—was only the most likely of these possible trajectories. There were countless others, real in a different sense: a vast but finite set of paths not taken, a ghostly forest of quantum alternatives, the shores of an unknown sea."

"What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency—chaos, complexity, life."

"The problem was the Voxish prophecies. Our founders had written them into the Coryphaeus as unalterable axioms—embedded truths, permanently exempt from debate or revision. That hadn’t mattered when the rapture of the Hypotheticals was a distant goal toward which we moved in gradual increments. But now we had come to the blunt end of the question. Prophecy had collided with reality, and the obvious inference—that the prophecies might have been mistaken—was a possibility the Coryphaeus was forbidden to consider."

"It was sad but completely understandable. Ten billion human beings without any cortical or limbic augmentation had simply acted to maximize their individual well-being. They hadn’t given much thought to long-term consequences, but how could they? They had no reliable mechanism by which they could think or act collectively. Blaming those people for the death of the ecosphere made as much sense as blaming water molecules for a tsunami."

"To whom had he retailed his conscience, Sandra wondered, and what was the going price these days?"

"She gave me a disdainful look. “Please don’t make facile judgments about things you don’t understand.”"

"Some things are taken away from you, some you leave behind—and some you carry with you, world without end."

"Sandra had spent her days rendering pass/fail verdicts over troubled minds, applying tests most functional adults easily passed. Is the subject oriented to time and place? Does the subject understand the consequences of his actions? But if she could give the same test to humanity as a whole, Sandra thought, the outcome would be very much in doubt. Subject is confused and often self-destructive. Subject pursues short-term gratification at the expense of his own well-being."

"The afternoon is too tempting to be denied. It isn’t Paradise here, or even close, but the mimosa is in bloom and the air from the sea is cool and pleasant. On days like this I think of poor old Magnus Stepney’s evolving Green God, harking us all up to Eden. The Green God’s voice is faint enough that few of us hear it clearly, and that’s our tragedy, I suppose, as a species—but I hear it very distinctly just now. It asks me to step into the sunshine, and I mean to do its bidding."

"Deacon Hollingshead: “The history of the world is written in Scripture, and it ends in a Kingdom.” Julian Comstock: “The history of the world is written in sand, and it evolves as the wind blows.”"

"Some pious men may find this truth unorthodox and bitter: But Nature, Chance, and Time ensure survival of the fitter!"

"“Sometimes he wears the crown,” Magnus Stepney once remarked, “and sometimes, by the grace of God, he takes the damned thing off.”"