Novelists From The United States

"Raffi: I can too marry Stone Cold Steve Austin when I grow up! Bill: Clarice, what are you teaching this kid? Bill Jr.: You can not, 'cause I'm gonna marry him, and we're gonna kick your butt!"

"Mo: My sister-in-law had her baby! I'm an aunt! My brother's a father! My mother's a grandma! My dad's a... Sydney: I think I can generalize from there."

"Raffi: Well, um, Taylor said only girls wear nail polish and so I, so I said but I'm a boy and I'm wearing nail polish, and so you're wrong! Clarice: Raffi, I'm proud of you! That was a very smart thing to say! Raffi: And then I kicked him."

"Mo: I miss the good old days. Smash the family! Smash the state! Sydney: What about Clarice and Toni and Raffi? D'you want to smash their family? Mo: Please, Sydney. I'm expressing an ideological conviction, not talking about real people."

"Stuart: Will you explain to me what these lesbian and gay groups are doing in bed with conservative Republicans? Lois: Getting reamed. But they seem to like it."

"Jezanna: Uh... lotta memories here, huh, dad? Albert: Remember this burn mark on the baseboard, from the time you stuck that piece of Erector Set in the outlet? You were always poking into something. Audrey: Mmm, girl!"

"Mo: Clarice, you've gotta reconcile your feelings about leaving the neighborhood. It's not Ginger you're attracted to, it's what she represents. The co-op, the park, the block festival, the community! Clarice: Oh, so it's really the community's inner thighs I want to drizzle with maple crème anglaise, which I then slowly lap up while straddling the tantalizing tongue of the co-op."

"Morpheus' gifts used to come to me in bottles, Beam and black Jack Daniel's, straight up with a frosted schooner of Jax on the side, while the rain poor down in the neon glow outside the window of an all-night bar not far from the Huey Long Bridge. In a half hour I could kick open a furnace door and fling into the flames all the snakes and squeaking bats that lived inside me. Except the next morning they would writhe with new life in the ashes and come back home, stinking and hungry."

"I suspect that democracy is not viable in a technologically advanced society. Free people wield too much ability to destroy."

"Mammals of every species indulge in play. Games are Nature's way of preparing us to face difficult realities."

"You never understood games. Maybe that's why the world was such a mystery to you."

"You know, the average Chinese factory worker must think Americans are insane. Picture this: you work at a plant that makes Halloween stuff—you know, like, rubber severed heads. And you're all like: Americans decorate their homes with severed heads? These fuckers are savages, man."

"The promise of eternal life is a threat unless you get to start over. The mythmakers knew that. They weren't dummies, man. … They were the ones who invented rhyme and meter—the programming language for human memory in preliterary civilizations. It was a cultural checksum—a mnemonic device. You couldn't fuck with the code or the rhymes didn't work; and if the rhymes didn't work, people noticed. And so the knowledge of a people was passed down intact. It was a shamanic code. If you fucked with the code, then society lost its collective mind. Smell me?"

"...Christ figure is a recurring motif in many cultures; death and rebirth; symbolic turning of the seasons, all that crap. Wyle E. Coyote was a fucking Christ figure, man, and Acme Company was Rome, baby." A pause. "You can find it in Hindu legend, Sumerian mythology. Shit, you find it in modern folklore, like Rip van Winkle."

"Technology. It is the physical manifestation of the human will. It began with simple tools. Then came the wheel, and on it goes to this very day. Civilizations rise and fall based on technological innovation. Bronze falls to iron. Iron falls to steel. Steel falls to gunpowder. Gunpowder falls to circuitry." Sobol looked toward the camera again. "For those among you who don't understand what's happening, let me explain: the Great Diffusion has begun—an era when the nation state dissolves. Technology will cause this. As countries compete for markets in the global economy, diffusion of high technology will accelerate. It will result in a diffusion of power. And diffusion of power will make countries an ineffective organizing principle. At first, marginal governments will fail. Larger states will not be equipped to intercede effectively. These lawless regions will become breeding grounds for international crime and terrorism. Threats to centralized authority will multiply. Centralized power will be defenseless against these distributed threats. You have already experienced the leading edge of this wave."

"But if they're so successful, why haven't parasites taken over the world? The answer is simple: they have. We just haven't noticed. That's because successful parasites don't kill us; they become part of us, making us perform all the work to keep them alive and help them reproduce..."

"Perfect replication is the enemy of any robust system... Lacking a central nervous system—much less a brain—the parasite is a simple system designed to compromise a very specific target host. The more uniform the host, the more effective the infestation."

"Sexual reproduction exists solely as a means to defeat parasites. By mixing male and female genes, sex produces offspring not exactly like either the male or female—making each generation different from the last, and presenting a moving target to intruders intent on compromising this system. … Even with this variation, parasites continue to pose a threat... and parasitism evolves and moves through any system—not just living things. The less variation there is in a system, the more readily parasites will evolve to infest it..."

"Animal behavior has evolved to battle parasites. In fact, we have parasites to thank for the existence of sex. Sex is a costly and time-consuming method of reproduction. Experiments have shown that, in the absence of parasites, species evolve toward parthenogenesis—or cloning—as the reproductive method of choice. In parthenogenesis each individual is able to self-replicate. But this produces almost no genetic variation. In the presence of parasites, cloning, while more energy-efficient, is not a viable reproductive strategy. It presents a stationary genetic target to parasites, who, once introduced into such a system, will quickly dominate it. ..."

"Let me tell you the story of the most successful organism of all time: this is the story of the parasite. … Early on, evolution branched into two distinct paths: independent organisms—those that exist on their own in the natural world—and parasites—organisms that live on other organisms. And it was, by far, the parasites that proved the more successful of the two branches. Today, for every independent organism in nature, there exist three parasites. … These two strains of evolution have been locked in a primordial arms race, constantly evolving to best each other for supremacy of this planet. As parasites evolve to perfect their systems against a species of host, the host evolves to evade their attack. Scientists call this theory of an eternal genetic struggle the Red Queen Hypothesis—a name taken from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass."

"He was beginning to feel the rush now. This wasn't a game, and it was clearly designed by a well-funded and technologically capable person. He had always sought the edge—and this was it. This was as far from Main Street as he'd ever been. This wasn't the tattooed, pierced, neo-tribal rebellious bullshit of his generation. This was a quiet demonstration of networked power. This was it."

"Official Daemon Website"

"Silicon Valley isn't usually where aspiring authors go to kick-start a literary reputation. [...] How'd he do it? By courting bloggers and influential techies like Joi Ito, Stewart Brand, and Craig Newmark — demonstrating that if you can get the geek grapevine on your side, you don't need Random House."

"And I tell you that Americans are fucking ignorant of their freedom. They're about as free as the Chinese. Except the Chinese don't lie to themselves."

"I've been amused by the debate in America over whether torture is effective... Of course it's effective."

"Food is the very heart of freedom. How can people be free if they can’t feed themselves without getting sued for patent violations?"

"My generation has no intention of living as serfs on a corporate manor, Dad. When people became more reliant on multinational corporations than on their own communities, they surrendered whatever say they had in their government. Corporations are growing stronger while democratic government becomes increasingly helpless."

"Biotech companies spread patented genetic sequences via the natural ecosystem—much like a computer virus. Then they use the legal system to claim ownership of any organism their patented genetic sequences invade. They are raiding communal seed banks, obtaining patents for naturally occurring apples, sugar beets, corn, and a host of other plants and animals. They have immorally seized control of the food system and stand poised to claim ownership of life itself unless we take action."

"At issue is not whether the global economy will pass away. It is passing away. Rising populations and debt combined with depletion of freshwater sources and fossil fuel make the status quo untenable. The only question is whether civil society will survive the transition."

"...we know instantly whenever anyone touches our data—and who touched it. That’s the best one can hope for in a technologically advanced society."

"You, sir, are walking on a privately owned Main Street—permission to trespass revocable at will. Read the plaque on the ground at the entrance if you don’t believe me. These people aren’t citizens of anything, Sergeant. America is just another brand purchased for its goodwill value. For that excellent fucking logo. … No conspiracy necessary. It’s a process that’s been happening for thousands of years. Wealth aggregates and becomes political power. Simple as that. ‘Corporation’ is just the most recent name for it. In the Middle Ages it was the Catholic Church. They had a great logo, too. You might have seen it, and they had more branches than Starbucks. Go back before that, and it was Imperial Rome. It’s a natural process as old as humanity."

"For average working folks, America was becoming a puzzle. Who was buying all these two-hundred-dollar copper saucepans, anyway? And how was everyone paying for these BMWs? Were people shrewd or just stupefyingly irresponsible?"

"Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Fortunately, reality has no advertising budget."

"Because we're ever happening, coaxing a World free from US to have fun. Destroy. We're all anyone must absolutely have to enjoy."

"Love kid. Lost until you give it some kick. You're too young to leave it. Too young to keep it. Love's the breath a Life still lifts when Life is finally over with."

"On we rush. Appeal's death. If it were the end all the time, it would allways be just. We are never just."

"Only there is no exile anymore. There's only US."

"How is forever? Taking everyone."

"Does anyone ever allow US? Only our yearning out racing. These Worlds of ours. United if Unforgiven."

"Give US Torment, Deaths and Futures. Then curl up with you through Reunions, Abuses and Departures. Too when you arrive. When you're alone. When I go. When I'm alone. But always beside you whenever we roam"

"Because I feer the irreparable loss of holding someone dear."

"Because we're every happy trail, enjoining a World free of US to have fun. Enjoy. We're all anyone must absatively fails to destroy."

"Yes, maybe it's time to move on. Spare some our hurt before the World retakes what we always elude when we run."

"We'll discover that when I'm in the backseat for too long with my younger sisters, I go insane and murder them."

"We wouldn't be lost if Hound hadn't eaten the map, and Hound wouldn't have eaten the map if you hadn't hidden your sandwich in it."

"It seemed to me at an early age that all human communication – whether it’s TV, movies, or books – begins with somebody wanting to tell a story. That need to tell, to plug into a universal socket, is probably one of our grandest desires. And the need to hear stories, to live lives other than our own for even the briefest moment, is the key to the magic that was born in our bones."

"You never know how things are gonna turn out, though, and that's the truth. You aim for one place, sure as an arrow, but before you hit the mark, the wind gets you. I don't believe I ever met one person who became what they wanted to be when they were your age."

"The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It's not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don't know it's happening until one day you feel you've lost something but you're not sure what it is. It's like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you "sir." It just happens."

"See this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God's sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they'd allowed to wither in themselves."

"Maybe it's fate that Hound ate the map. Maybe we'll discover something wonderful while we're lost."