Novelists From The United States

"During those months of living in their world, I often wondered if the truth would, in fact, improve their lives. I wanted so much to tell them the truth, of their country and of the outside world, where Arab youth were turning their rotten regime inside out, using the power of social media, where everyone except them was connected through the world wide web, which wasn't worldwide after all. But for them, the truth was dangerous. By encouraging them to run after it, I was putting them at risk -- of persecution, of heartbreak. When you're not allowed to express anything in the open, you become good at reading what is unspoken."

"Esther trusted God to lead her as she let go of fear in her life-changing moment."

"She was not a powerless bystander. She was an ethical queen."

"The Esther Effect was of Godly righteousness, humility, and peacefulness."

"And then she’d take off again, with a sort of confused-confounded glance down at me, as though every time she came home, it was a shock to remember that I’d ever been born."

"Oh, certainly it had been alarming at first. But adjusting to certain changes in your circumstances was easy when you didn’t really care about anything. As far as she was concerned, she’d always talked. By some miracle, everyone else had recently achieved the ability to listen properly. She was over the novelty within half an hour. No one listened to her or asked for her input or attended gratefully to her needs any more than they ever had. They were too busy making big monkey fusses over their big monkey problems."

"My percussionist thinks you have a touch of Metastasized Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Blek. My diagnosis? You’re an asshole. Sadly, the only known cure is being set on fire and dropped off a balcony."

"Everyone imitates our groove these days. But we were into poisoning our competition and performing an extended dance sequence on their graves before it was cool."

"We have always believed that one of the hallmarks of sentience is the ability to look down upon others. It separates us from the lichen."

"“And how does that make you feel?” he crooned in the comforting tone of a therapist who may or may not actually care."

"Dying happens to everyone, even stars. Even the stuff between the stars. But if you believe in yourself and achieve your goals, you can die so hard that no one will ever forget you, and that’s almost as good as not dying at all. Well, it isn’t, really, it isn’t at all, and believing and achieving is just something sportscasters say, but what are you gonna do, not die? Try it. I’ll wait."

"And then another song began, better than that one. Each song was so impossible, so perfect, so complex, so anatomically baffling, and they only grew more heartbreaking and piercing, the special effects more dazzling, the fire in the ice and the psychic manipulation of the audience, that both of them sobbed and sobbed as if they had lost every last thing in the world. Hours passed. The humans watched in an agony of feeling, in a rictus of involuntary ecstasy and horror and grief and artistic nirvana, their bodies shuddering, their brains a sea of flaming blue emotion. The cat watched with semi-mild interest. It was all right, she supposed, if you were into that sort of thing."

"A cow goes moo; a sheep goes baa; a celebrity correspondent goes who are you wearing?"

"Everybody fucks.…Being ashamed of it makes about as much sense as being ashamed of the speed of light."

"Though any species on any dumb gobworld may develop sentience (the poor bastards), no government ever does."

"Everyone’s always saying love is the element that binds the universe together, but that’s a load of bollocks; it’s convenience."

"People are mostly happiest when they think they’re just about to get the thing they want most. Before and after, they’re all monsters."

"The universe is a very large and very complicated demonstration of having one’s cake and eating it too. It sees no reason not to have it all."

"Sex is universal, it’s just not evenly distributed."

"The only question is this: Do you have enough empathy and yearning and desperation to connect to others outside yourself and scream into the void in four-part harmony? Enough brainpower and fine motor control and aesthetic ideation to look at feathers and stones and stuff that comes out of a worm’s more unpleasant holes and see gowns, veils, platform heels? Enough sheer style and excess energy to do something that provides no direct, material benefit to your personal survival, that might even mark you out from the pack as shiny, glittery prey, to do it for no other reason than that it rocks?"

"Everything in the universe has rhythm. Everything pulses to a beat laid down by the Big Bang. Everything feels the drumline of creation from star to sex to song."

"I felt like I was the only one who understood that the only wall we could ever build against What’s Going On was the glitter and the shine and the synth and the knowing grin that never stops knowing. The show. Because the opposite of fascism isn’t anarchy, it’s theater. When the world is fucked, you go to the theater, you go to the shine, and when the bad men come, all there is left to do is sing them down."

"I don’t know why you would even bring up the Internet. The xeno-intelligence officer responsible for evaluating your digital communication required invasive emergency therapy after an hour’s exposure. One glance at that thing is the strongest argument possible against the sentience of humanity. I wouldn’t draw attention to it, if I were you."

"Everyone you know is a monster, sweetie. We’ve watched a lot of your media, you know. It’s an excellent way to evaluate societal sentience. You seem to be very concerned with monsters. Monsters from above, monsters from below, monsters among you, monsters from the sea, radioactive monsters, machine monsters, magical monsters, serial monsters who can only be stopped by monsters with badges. It’s a whole thing with you people. We got terrifically bored after a while. After all, you always win against the monsters, even though you’re the ones slowly cooking your planet because you can’t be bothered not to, butchering one another for fun and profit, making up elaborate stories that start with being calm and treating everyone with kindness and equality but somehow always end with somebody getting enslaved, absolutely obliterating the other species with whom you share a world so you can take a photograph with their corpses or gobble up their best features in hopes of achieving a more satisfying erection, and being generally willing to sell the fleeting, unique, fragile lives of everyone you’ve ever met if it means you can consume a slightly larger share of resources than they can. You can’t even agree on whether or not a sick child should get a tissue without having to really work for it. None of you seems to be able to stand one another. How will you treat us, if you are allowed to swarm across the galaxy? Which of us have horns or tusks or claws we feel quite attached to that might arouse your sluggish organs? Yes, of course, you’ve done some clever things with your time. No one is denying that rhythmic gymnastics are really just terrific. But in a clinch, you lot would rather watch someone suffer untold horrors than watch them enjoy so much as a cool drink if you don’t have two of your own, and yours have cherries in them as well as more ice and little paper umbrellas, and even then most of you would still prefer to take theirs and have three. This is not the behavior of a sentient race. It is the behavior of wild animals. Even your babies view anyone who doesn’t look just exactly like their parents with seething suspicion. It’s baked in to you. I’ll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life. Now, how does that usually pan out in the movies, kitten? At least we let you try to convince us we’re wrong. I doubt you asked the dodo birds what they thought about it before you blasted the last one in the face with a blunderbuss."

"What was magical at two in the morning was tawdry and cheap and dangerous to your health at two in the afternoon."

"But in the end, all wars are more or less the same. If you dig down through the layers of caramel corn and peanuts and choking, burning death, you’ll find the prize at the bottom and the prize is a question and the question is this: Which of us are people and which of us are meat?"

"They are time, and time eats everything but listens to no one."

"Are you kind enough, on your little planet, not to shut that rhythm down? Not to crush underfoot the singers of songs and tellers of tales and wearers of silk? Because it’s monsters who do that. Who extinguish art. Who burn books. Who ban music. Who yell at anyone with ears to turn off that racket. Who cannot see outside themselves clearly enough to sing their truth to the heavens. Do you have enough goodness in your world to let the music play? Do you have soul?"

"“Stories are pretty dumb animals. And so aggressive!” I clapped my hands. “Say three ways they’re dumb!” “Let’s see.” Papo counted them off on his fingers. “They’re cold-blooded, they use big words when they ought to use small ones, and they have no natural defense against comets.”"

"Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays."

"You can’t stop people being assholes. They do love it so. The best you can hope for is that some people, sometimes, will turn out to be somewhat less than the absolute worst. When they manage to trip and fall over that incredibly low bar, they’ll make you want to end it all. But when they leap over it, they’ll make you believe this whole mess really was created for a reason—the bastards. Except me, of course. I’m superb. Ask anyone. And you’re all right, I suppose. Welcome to being a people, kid. It’s just dreadful up here."

"Failure was here before you and she’ll be here after you and she won’t even notice you go."

"He’d only said what he meant, which was, when you thought about it, a minor superpower, because so few people ever did."

"Sometimes I don't know," Rodney said, wiping his brow with the back of his greasy hand. "Sometimes I don't know if I was born mean, or if the world just made me that way."

"The body, I have often thought, is like a promise. You keep things in it. Those things are covert, immediate, yours. There is something lustrous about them. They emit energy, like radium or appliances. They can be replaced, repaired or simply discarded. The promise of the body is very firm and intact. It's the only promise we can count on, and we can't really count on it very much."

"You know what Christmas means? It means if I love you, I'm going to buy you a whole load of crap. The more I love you, the bigger the load gets. Sometimes, if you can afford it, you can get your loved one literally tons of crap, and then they're really loved. Love, love, love. Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas. Buy some more crap. Come on, line up and buy yourselves a whole lot more crap. Here's something nice. Bought any crap quite like this crap recently? Crap crap crap. Ho ho ho. Like that mechanical Santa Claus in the Montgomery Ward's window display. Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas, everybody. Have yourselves all one fucking hell of a merry little Christmas, all you poor stupid saps. Line up and get taken, that's what I say, that's what Santa says. We take MasterCard cards and Visa cards. Come on, losers. Line up on this side. Get your money taken on that side."

"That's not to say Gilbert is just unlucky. Oh, he is, but it goes beyond that. Gilbert manages always to be Old Man [Trouble]'s sorriest victim and, at the same time, his most indispensable collaborator. Fate and fate alone may place the banana peel in his path, but it is Gilbert who will every time make certain that at the moment of rendezvous he's carrying a tray laden with Baccarat crystal which he has, in order to impress a date, borrowed without the knowledge or permission of its owner, and which he'd been hoping to return in secret. (Chapter 1)"

"He opened another beer, and I warmed some canned chili on the stove. Pedro ate most of it, sponging up the red chili sauce with slices of his doughy Wonderbread. "This is a hard fast world we live in, kiddo—and I'm telling you this as a friend, now. All this teary-eyed feeling sorry for yourself childhood crap just doesn't work—doesn't work for long, anyway. I can promise you that. I mean, your mom wants you to have this idyllic childhood and all. She thinks this is Camelot or something, your childhood. Well, I want you to know, kiddo. I looked up 'idyllic' in the dictionary and I wouldn't hold my breath. I wouldn't lie in bed all day just waiting for some idyllic childhood to come along.""

"I turned. The schoolground seemed to be glowing. It wasn't like night so much as like night on some high-tech movie set. Invisible machines operated everywhere. Hidden technicians monitored, taped, replayed and edited. Truth could be collapsed and disarranged. Life was not fact, but montage. I might even be an actor playing somebody else's role. My mind might be a stage upon which some cultural drama played."

"We will not be giving ourselves up. Death, then? said Seth. Victory, said Prince Tsui. Call it what you like, Seth replied, the end is the same."

"He sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature . . . the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while."

"They looked up and Prince Tsui introduced himself and they didn’t care. Their stomachs were empty."

"The energy of American Jewish writers was so charged, so buoyant, that for a time they appeared to dominate American fiction. But there was so little Jewish energy in this art that one could invent parlor games over the ethnic or religious identity of its authors: Edna Ferber? Waldo Frank? Lillian Hellman? Nathanael West? Norman Mailer? E. L. Doctorow?"

"She smiled. Everyone is greedy, she said. Even people who have all the money and power in the universe want more to protect what they already have."

"I told them many things, she said, if you knew what was good for you, you wouldn’t truly believe anything I say without proof."

"He got in loud fights with Baba all the time. I don’t remember words. Words are never important in arguments, only how loud we shout them."

"Justice is the motive of heartless people, who protect their gold with the sword."

"I will not argue with you a moment more, said Adel. I am tired of the past, and there is so much to do in the present."

"Men gain their thrones by selling their daughters, or sending their sons to die."

"You will never understand freedom. You and your son will never understand true freedom. You think freedom is the throne of the world, where no one can alter your words, and no one can tell you what to do, and men live or die by the slight twitch of your eyebrow. That isn’t freedom. That is a life of fear."