Novelists From The United States

"Sure, you can live out your dreams, but it’ll only turn you into a monster."

"“It’s a funny thing about the old gods,” he said. “You think that just because they’re old they must be difficult to kill. But when the fighting starts, they go down just like anybody else. They aren’t stronger, they’re just older.”"

"If he couldn’t go back, he would just have to do things differently going forward. He felt how infinitely safer and more sound this attitude was. The trick was just not wanting anything. That was power. That was courage: the courage not to love anyone or hope for anything. The funny thing about it was how easy everything got, when nothing mattered."

"The power to create order is one thing. The power to destroy is another. Always they are in balance. But it is easier to destroy than to create, and there are those whose nature it is to love destruction."

"“Well, but why would You create something that had the power to hurt You? Or any of Your creatures? Why don’t You help us? Do You have any idea how much we hurt? How much we suffer?” A stern glance. “I know all things, daughter.” “Well, okay, then know this.” Janet put her hands on her hips. She had struck an unexpected vein of bitterness in herself, and it was running away with her. “We human beings are unhappy all the time. We hate ourselves and we hate each other and sometimes we wish You of Whoever had never created us or this shit-ass world or any other shit-ass world. Do You realize that? So next time You might think about not doing such a half-assed job.”"

"To be honest, Quentin felt superior to anybody who still messed around with magic. They could delude themselves if they liked, those self-indulgent magical mandarins, but he’d outgrown that stuff. He wasn’t a magician anymore, he was a man, and a man took responsibility for his actions."

"We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler."

"“Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there’s nothing else. It’s here, and you’d better decide to enjoy it or you’re going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.” “You can’t just decide to be happy.” “No, you can’t. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable. Is that what you want?”"

"In different ways they had both discovered the same truth: that to live out childhood fantasies as a grown-up was to court and wed and bed disaster."

"He couldn’t ignore how conspicuously beautiful Venice was. People had been living here for what, a thousand years? More? God only knew whose crazy idea it was to build a city in the middle of a lagoon, but you couldn’t argue with the results."

"“The Dean will probably be down to get you in another minute,” Eliot said. “Here’s my advice. Sit there…and try to look like you belong here. And if you tell him you saw me smoking, I will banish you to the lowest circle of hell. Which I’ve never been there, but if even half of what I hear is true it’s almost as bad as Brooklyn.”"

"They were crossing so many lines it was hard to figure out where they were anymore."

"It wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t everything either."

"Some tiny sane part of him knew he was out of control, but that wasn’t the part of him that had its hands on the wheel."

"Anyway, the mood he was in, Quentin was willing to take any position on any subject with anybody if it meant he could pick a fight."

"“But I ain’t made up my mind on hell, not yet. Maybe it’s truly a-burning away, down below our feet, right this minute.” “Or either, the fire down in there is what made folks decide what hell was.”"

"“If you drop a hook in, you’ll get a bite right quick,” I said. “Maybe not the biggest fish, but the best fighter. They’d fight one another to take the hook.” “There’s some sort of parable to that thought,” she said, not air way cheerfully. “How life gives you something you think is good and wholesome, and then uses it to yank you out of your world.”"

"By now the rain rushed down instead of fell down. It was like what my old folks used to call raining tomcats and hoe handles."

"Got some dirty tricks? If that’s how it is, you done drove your ducks to the wrong puddle."

"Anyway, you think for yourself. And if a man can’t do that, he isn’t really thinking."

"Weather was a-getting ready to happen."

"I don’t rightly know today whether I was scared at that time. A thing can come along and happen to you, and you don’t have the time to make up your mind if you’re scared, because there’s so almighty much else you’ve got to tend to somehow."

"Mind your feet, don’t stumble, and don’t be afraid. Because there never was a better time not to be afraid."

"But if I feared it, I faced up to it anyway. A man’s got to be a man sometime. You show me one who was nair afraid, and I’ll right away show you one that nair in his life came up against aught to fear."

"Children who seem unlikely to do well ... sometimes find that their work stays on the kitchen wall longer than usual; and so it was with me. I was encouraged to be creative past the usual age because I didn't have much else going for me. I was a skinny, plain, off-looking little girl, deaf in one badly damaged ear from a birth injury, and with a resulting atrophy of the facial muscles that pulled my mouth sideways whenever I opened it to speak and turned my smile into a sort of sneer. I was clever, or, as one of my teachers put it, "too clever for her own good," but not especially charming or affectionate or helpful. I couldn't seem to learn to ride a bike or sing in tune, and I was always the last person chosen for any team."

"You come to a certain age and you know there is no event that can ruin your life. Or completely change it."

"Men called me a philosopher once, but as the years burdened me further I cared less and less for the pressing questions of astronomy and geomancy and metaphysics and the like. They had been pressing since long before I was born, and I knew they would continue to be so as long as there were two students left to argue over the difference between the real and the ideal."

"This place was not divine. It was enchanted, which was a different thing altogether."

"Nothing frightens a miser more than the prospect of not getting paid."

"“Have I come to a second Bedlam? Are you all mad here?” “Madness is the order of the day,” the lord replied. “Even God is mad. We follow divine example.”"

"The true horror story requires a sense of evil, not in necessarily in a theological sense; but the menaces must be truly menacing, life-destroying, and antithetical to happiness."

"Horror is not quite as elusive as science fiction, for which there are as many definitions as definers. Most modern practitioners will agree that it's a matter of mood, not of specific content. A story can be horrific without being supernatural or even fantastic, as much of Edgar Allan Poe readily demonstrates. In the simplest sense, a horror story is one that scares us."

"“What’s the matter?” said Gutharad after a while. “You seem glum suddenly.” “I was thinking of something.” “Well don’t. If you forget your troubles and just go where your feet take you, you’ll be happy. That’s the real secret of life. Not that load of camel crap I fed you this afternoon.”"

"“Listen, and listen well. This is the wisdom to end wisdom, the secret of all secrets.” They both leaned very close, and he told them. “Some people…will believe…anything!”"

"Prophecies and mysteries. The world was full of them. He didn’t care."

"“What can I do without you?” “Whatever is within you.”"

"I am going into a far country, from which I shall never return. They say that when we depart thence, when we walk the last long road, if we are brave and true and avoid all the perils, we come to paradise, and sit there listening to The Musician play beautiful songs for all of eternity. But this is uncertain, for no witness has ever come back to report it."

"“I wish something would happen,” he said after a long silence. Amaedig stood beside him, fidgeting with a clump of ivy. “Don’t,” she said. “What?” “Don’t wish something would happen. If it does, you probably won’t like it.”"

"At last he understood that he was a prisoner within the palace as much as he was within his own body, that it was not his power which mastered anything, that he would no more rule the world than the glove on a king’s hand actually holds the scepter."

"Now he truly knew, for the first time, that there was no one out there to hear him, that any prayer he might utter would drift and tumble through eternity like a shard of a broken mirror falling through the space beyond the world, turning over and over, glittering, never, never coming to rest."

"I saw again in the morning with the holy Tancred, Bishop of Anjou, of Averoigne, and Poictesme, stood before the troops in the dim light of dawn with the walled city at his back. There was complete silence, save for the cawing of expectant crows and the flapping of banners in the brisk wind. He spoke: “Soldiers of Christ, in yonder city wait ten thousand pagans, idolaters, devil-worshipers, atheists, and Jews, each of them by every breath he breathes an affront to the God who created him and a triumph for the Adversary who corrupted him. This is your task, mighty men of valor and virtue, your task set for you by God on high, to rid the land of this infection, to cleanse with fire and sword the very pavement on which the unclean ones walk. I have prayed for victory this day, and just before I came to you I had a vision. I saw in the sky, above the hills and above the pagan city, the great sign of the Cross, blazing as it did for Constantine when he embraced the Saviour, in this sign we too shall conquer. Jesus looks on. His Holy Mother waits to take any who die today in her own arms into paradise. Onward! For Christ and the Cross! “Christ and the Cross!” The cry returned from every throat, and the host surged thunderously forward like an inexorable tide. The first wave broke against the stone walls of the city, and the battle was joined. “Christ and the Cross!” men shouted as they fell screaming beneath curtains of molten iron poured from above. “Christ and the Cross!” resounded once more as mangonels, catapults, and ballistas filled the air with death."

"“Stand here and look,” he said. “Look, and you’ll see the Earth as it always was, even before the death of The Goddess. I come here sometimes to reflect, when the toils of my station are more than I can bear. I come out here to where it seems that mankind and all his works have made no more impression on the Earth than the passing shadow of a cloud. I told myself not to worry, to face what I must face with courage and dignity, for nothing matters ultimately. I come out here to watch the sun rise.”"

"So now the tale is done. What moral? There was in the abbey a learned man who insisted that all things have a greater meaning, that life is but a symbol of motions on a higher plane. Nothing, he said, is random. Nothing is without purpose. Yet I blundered into my adventure and out of it, seeking only to save my own life. I came to the only place a wretched fugitive could have come on such a night, and my escape was miracle enough. A meaning? A purpose? When others, as the ballads tell, pass into Faerie, or into the lands of the dead, it is for some lofty purpose, to learn some deep wisdom, or to rescue a loved one, or to save a kingdom. It was not like that with me. My life will make a poor amusement if it is ever told. There is no form to it, no order. No conclusion, no moral, no answers. Only more questions."

"Behind her, far away, filling the skies that were not of Earth, was the face of another, a mountainous Dark One who sat awash in a lake of molten metal with a sword in his hand. When I gaze upon him I knew the truth of all. I knew that if God is mad, and the signs show that he is, his Foe is mad also, and there can be no hope for the world between them, for creation is but a battleground for two maniacs in their death struggle."

"“Christ and Satan!” “Swear by whomever you like,” laughed the King. “Why not Jupiter, Thor, Mithra, and Ahura-Mazda also? It’ll do you as much good.”"

"I listened to all this with the dull incomprehension of a pig in the slaughterhouse overhearing the talk of two butchers."

"“Were you not at the Holy City when the army of the faithful burst in? Did you not yourself partake in the slaughter of the pagans, and the women and infants of the pagans, those who were born in lands where the gospel never reached? Did you not do this and much more, all for the glory of God? And does not that same All Mighty and All Merciful God damn men for sins of weakness and ignorance when He himself made them imperfect and prone to weakness, and taught them not so that they remained ignorant? Did He not allow the serpent to enter the Garden, make no move to stop it, then punished severely his beguiled servants?” “Lady, as you said, you know the answers. All these things are true.” “Then I ask you, Julian, are these actions of a loving God?” “I—I—don’t—” “Know! But you do. This knowledge is the heritage of all men. You know they are not, and yet more shall you know. God is mad, Julian. He babbles on his throne of light, and the sound of his gurgling fills his angels with fear. He sends them forth with flaming swords to raze the cities of men, and when thousands upon thousands have been slain, and the smoke of their pyres rises into the heights of the sky, when pestilence and famine slay thousands more, then God laughs and roars like some mindless beast, ‘THIS IS PLEASING TO ME!’” “Why do you tell me these things? Why have I been brought here?” “Because you are to join us in our war against the Father. He has grown weak in his madness, so preoccupied with dreaming new ways to torture men that he will not notice when the very gates of Hell fly open and the armies of his old Adversary issue forth.”"

"“One more thing I will tell you, the great secret I learned through my experience.” “What was that?” “Never listen to idle tales. They make you mad and lead you through the bowels of a god.” “Of course,” said one of the disciples after he had left, “it is the nature of the madness that one never heeds these warnings.”"

"I lost my faith on a foreign shore, in the shade of the conscience tree. In the shade of the conscience tree, on a foreign shore, where the sand ran wet with the blood of children."

"“This isn’t fair.” “Hell, no! It’s democracy.”"