Novelists From The United States

"Elizabeth Zott had been a character — a minor character — in a book that I started and shelved. But she came back to me one day. And this is, seriously, like ten years later. I'd had a really, really bad day at work. I'd endured some, what I would call, average sexism. I'd been in a meeting, and somebody basically took credit for all of my ideas ... after I had just presented them. ... I went back to my desk and I felt like Elizabeth Zott was sitting there. And I wrote the first chapter of Lessons in Chemistry — that day in my office."

"That’s what governments are there for, to keep good things from happening."

"I’m proud to be part of a pantheon of elected leaders who, from around this country, found their voices and lifted up their communities. What we were able to do in Georgia was build an unprecedented multicultural, multiethnic coalition. We tripled Latino and Asian Pacific Islander participation. We increased youth participation by 139 percent. And we outperformed with African Americans and with white voters to numbers that haven’t been seen in Georgia before. And what that signals is that you can win in America, you can win in the Deep South, by talking to communities and engaging them where they are and treating them with the respect that every community deserves."

"I'm proud to be supporting Stacey Abrams for Governor of Georgia. She will make access to universal Pre-K a reality for Georgia’s children, raise the minimum wage, that currently at $5.15 an hour keeps families trapped in poverty, eliminate cash bail, and make sure people can participate in their government by introducing automatic voter registration."

"Dorothy Lee Bolden's emphasis on voting rights and equality was also heard loud and clear by another generation of community-minded Black leaders like voting rights activist and politician Stacey Abrams, whose 2018 gubernatorial campaign was strongly supported in Atlanta by the National Domestic Workers Alliance."

"The schools are there to regulate the flow of young competitors into the job market."

"Mother Culture’s deception here is that schools exist to serve the needs of people. In fact, they exist to serve the needs of your economy. The schools turn out graduates who can’t live without jobs but who have no job skills, and this suits your economic needs perfectly. What you’re seeing at work in your schools isn’t a system defect, it’s a system requirement, and they meet that requirement with close to one hundred percent efficiency."

"Crimes are what the state defines as crimes."

"Without a standing army, a king is just a windbag in fancy clothes."

"By the simple act of being locked up, food was transformed into a product—the fundamental product of your economy."

"Totalitarian agriculture is based on the premise that all the food in the world belongs to us, and there is no limit whatever to what we may take for ourselves and deny to all others."

"Six billion of you wake up every morning and start devouring the world."

"I wonder if you’ve ever considered how strange it is that the educational and character-shaping structures of our culture expose us but a single time in our lives to the ideas of Socrates, Plato, Euclid, Aristotle, Herodotus, Augustine, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Descartes, Rousseau, Newton, Racine, Darwin, Kant, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Freud, Marx, Einstein, and dozens of others of the same rank, but expose us annually, monthly, weekly, and even daily to the ideas of persons like Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, and Buddha. Why is it, do you think, that we need quarterly lectures on charity, while a single lecture on the laws of thermodynamics is presumed to last us a lifetime? Why is the meaning of Christmas judged to be so difficult of comprehension that we must hear a dozen explications of it, not once in a lifetime, but every single year, year after year after year? Perhaps even more to the point, why do the pious (who already know every word of whatever text they find holy) need to have it repeated to them week after week after week, and even day after day after day?"

"A few years ago, when I begin speaking to audiences, I have the rather naive idea that it would be sufficient—indeed entirely sufficient—to say each thing exactly once. Only gradually did I understand that saying a thing once is tantamount to not saying it at all."

"It means I’ve been changed, fundamentally and permanently. It means I cannot be put back to what I was. That’s why I am B: I cannot be put back to what I was."

"Q. Wasn’t agriculture developed as a response to famine? A. Agriculture is useless as a response to famine. You can no more respond to famine by planting a crop than you can respond to falling out of an airplane by knitting a parachute. But this really misses the point. To say that agriculture was developed as a response to famine is like saying that cigarette smoking was developed as a response to lung cancer. Agriculture doesn’t cure famine, it promotes famine—it creates the conditions in which famines occur. Agriculture makes it possible for more people to live in an area than that area can support—and that’s exactly where famines occur."

"A system based on exchanging products inevitably channels wealth to a few, and no governmental change will ever be able to correct that. It isn’t a defect of the system, it’s intrinsic to the system."

"What was forgotten in the Great Forgetting was the fact that, before the advent of agriculture and village life, humans had lived in a profoundly different way.…Paleontology made untenable the idea that humanity, agriculture, and civilization all began at roughly the same time."

"Of course, there is no one right way for people to live, any more than there is one right way for birds to build nests or for spiders to spin webs."

"I left, and because it seemed like a good time to start being a little less incredibly trusting, I didn’t turn my back on him till I was outside with the door shut between us."

"“The question is, can you do would B did?” “What exactly do you have in mind?” “You took in their insights, but do you have any of your own? Are you a thinker and a teacher or just a reciter of Holy Writ? If all you can do is chant the Scriptures, then you’re no more B than I am. You’re just an altar boy who has all the responses down pat.”"

"“And you actually authorized his assassination?” The man shrugged. “You said it very well, Jared: These days are still those days. Nothing’s changed in the last five hundred years—or the last thousand—except that heretics cannot longer be executed in public. I take all this as seriously as Pope Innocent the Third, who ordered up a crusade against the Albigenses. I take it all as seriously as Pius the Fifth, who, when he was the grand inquisitor, personally instigated the massacre of thousands of Protestants in southern Italy. I take it all as seriously as Thomas Aquinas, who said, ’if ordinary criminals may be justly put to death, then how much more may heretics be justly slain.’ For Thomas well knew that the murderer just shortens his neighbors’ temporal life, whereas the heretic deprives them of eternal life. If you no longer understand the difference—or if it no longer matters to you—then I assume you’ve lost your faith.”"

"These caves aren’t art galleries or shamanistic temples, they’re schools of the hunting arts—the equivalent of one of our museums of science and industry."

"All paths lie together like a web endlessly woven, and yours and mine are no greater or less than the beetle’s or the mouse’s. All are held together."

"What works, evidently, is cultural diversity. This should not come as a surprise. If culture is viewed as a biological phenomenon, then we should expect to see diversity favored over uniformity. A thousand designs—one for every locale and situation—always works better than one design for all locals and situations. Birds are more likely to survive in ten thousand nest patterns than in one. Mammals are more likely to survive in ten thousand social patterns that in one. And humans are more likely to survive in ten thousand cultures than in one—as we are in the process of proving right now. We’re in the process of making the world unlivable for ourselves—precisely because everyone is being forced to live a single way. There would be no problem if only one person in ten thousand lived the way we live. The problem appears only as we approach the point where only one person in ten thousand is permitted to live any other way than the way we live. In a world of ten thousand cultures, one culture can be completely mad and destructive, and little harm will be done. In a world of one culture—and that one culture completely mad and destructive—catastrophe is inevitable."

"I am at what seminarians used to call “the Company Farm,” which is where you go when you “need a little rest”—or a little vacation from booze—or the whispers about you and the altar boys are beginning to get a bit noisy. All the big orders have them, of course, some of them have several, thoughtfully specialized. Naturally they are not called penitentiaries anymore; nowadays they are called retreat centers."

"“Nature is a phantom that sprang entirely from the Great Forgetting, which, after all, is precisely a forgetting of the fact that we are exactly as much a part of the processes and phenomena of the world as any other creature, and if there were such a thing as Nature, we would be as much a part of it as squirrels or squids or mosquitoes or daffodils. We are unable to alienate ourselves from Nature or to ’live against’ it. We can no more alienate ourselves from Nature than we can alienate ourselves from entropy. We can no more live against Nature than we can live against gravity. On the contrary, what we’re seeing here more and more clearly is that the processes and phenomena of the world are working on us in exactly the same way that they work on all other creatures. Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable—and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way.”"

"The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by new minds—with no programs."

"In 1950 there wasn’t the slightest whisper of a doubt about this anywhere in our culture, East or West, capitalist or communist. In 1950 this was something everyone could agree on: Exploiting the world was our God-given right. The world was created for us to exploit. Exploiting the world actually improved it! There was no limit to what we could do. Cut as much down as you like, dig up as much as you like. Scrape away the forests, fill in the wetlands, dam the rivers, dump poisons anywhere you want, as much as you want. None of this was regarded as wicked or dangerous. Good heavens, why would it be? The earth was created specifically to be used in this way. It was a limitless, indestructible playroom for humans. You simply didn’t have to consider the possibility of running out of something or of damaging something. The earth was designed to take any punishment, to absorb and sweeten any toxin, in any quantity. Explode nuclear weapons? Good heavens, yes—as many as you want! Thousands, if you like. Radioactive material generated while trying to achieve our God-given destiny can’t harm us. Wipe out whole species? Absolutely! Why ever not? If people don’t need these creatures, then obviously they’re superfluous! To exercise such control over the world is to humanize it, to take us a step closer to our destiny."

"No story is devoid of meaning, if you know how to look for it. This is as true of nursery rhymes and daydreams as it is of novels and epic poems."

"History—and not just thirty years of history but ten thousand years of history—offers no support whatever for the idea that we can simultaneously increase food production and end population growth. On the contrary, history resoundingly confirms what ecology teaches: If you make more food available, there will be more people to consume it."

"Don’t make faces. It won’t hurt you to hear a new word."

"I told him these numbers were hard to believe. “Do the arithmetic yourself sometime, then you won’t have to believe it, you’ll know it."

"No two journeys are ever alike, because no two pupils are ever alike."

"The world must live, the world must live! We are only one species among billions. The gods don’t love us more than they love spiders or bears or whales or water lilies."

"People seldom look very hard for things they don’t want to find."

"Those who wish to imagine that God called every species to life in a final, changeless form are welcome to do so, but I’m incapable of embracing such a primitive scenario."

"They’re sure that there must be all sorts of things wrong with ever tribal way of life, and of course they’re correct—if you mean by “wrong” something you don’t like."

"“This may be totally wrong,” I told him. “This may just be the simple truth, but this is what I hear: ‘sure, you can save the world, but you're really going to hate it. It's really going to be painful.’” “Why is it going to be painful?” “Because of all the stuff we have to give up. But as I say, this may just be the simple truth.” “No, it's not the simple truth, Julie. It's Mother Culture’s simple lie. Although Mother Culture is a metaphor, she really does behave uncannily like a real person sometimes. Why do you think she would tell this particular lie?” “She wants to discourage us from changing, I guess.” “Of course. Her whole function is to preserve the status quo. This is not a peculiarity of your Mother Culture. In every culture, it's the function of Mother Culture to preserve the status quo.”"

"“Whenever a Taker couple talk about how wonderful it would be to have a big family, they’re reenacting the scene beside the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They’re saying to themselves, ‘Of course it’s our right to apportion life on this planet as we please. Why stop at four kids or six? We can have fifteen if we like. All we have to do is plow under another few hundred acres of rain forest—and who cares if a dozen other species disappear as a result?’”"

"Mankind was not needed to bring order to the world."

"Adam wasn’t the progenitor of our race, he was the progenitor of our culture."

"In order to make their story come true, the Takers have to put an end to creation itself—and they’re doing a damned good job of it."

"The premise of the Taker story is the world belongs to man.... The premise of the Leaver story is man belongs to the world."

"You must face the fact that increasing food production doesn’t feed your hungry, it only fuels your population explosion."

"If the will is there, the method will be found."

"Obviously Mother Culture must be finished off if you’re going to survive, and that’s something the people of your culture can do. She has no existence outside your minds. Once you stop listening to her, she ceases to exist."

"This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world’s divinely appointed ruler."

"The world was not made for any one species."

"Of course it’s not enough. But if you begin anywhere else, there’s no hope at all."