Novelists From The United States

"Civilization.… Like everything else, it has a price. The down payment is freedom. For the privilege of living together, men surrender the right to do as they please; they make laws and restrict themselves within them. When civilization is conferred from outside, the price is even steeper: someone else makes the laws."

"The difficulties were great, the odds were greater, but Horn would conquer them. And, having conquered them, be left unsatisfied. Life holds no kindness for such a man. Any defeat short of death is only a spur; success is empty. With cold self-analysis, Horn recognized this fact, accepted it, and went on unchanged."

"The vampire legend, he might conclude, has served conveniently for many thousand years as a conventional folk expression of unconscious feelings of aggression and guilt."

"He certainly didn’t feel insane, he reflected—but then did any lunatic, ever?"

"“The only real scientific support of extrasensory and psychokinetic phenomena has come from such studies as those at Duke University,” he added. “Some of the published results purporting to show the reality of ESP and the mental manipulation of probability are pretty convincing—but I’m afraid the wish to demonstrate the survival of the soul has blinded the researchers to some grave flaw in their experimental or statistical methods.” He shook his head, with a sober emphasis. “This universe, to me, is strictly mechanistic. Every phenomena that takes place in it—from the birth of suns to the tendency of men to live in fear of gods and devils—was implicit in the primal superatom from whose explosive cosmic energy it was formed. The efforts that some distinguished scientists make to find room for operation of a free human will and the creative function of supernatural divinity in such apparent defects of mechanistic determination as Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty—those futile efforts are as pathetic to me as the crudest attempt of a witch doctor to make it rain by sprinkling water on the ground. All the so-called supernatural, Mr. Barbee, is pure delusion, based on misdirected emotion and inaccurate observation and illogical thinking.” His calm brown face smiled hopefully. “Does that make you feel any better?” “It does, doctor.”"

"“I’m not a religious man, Mr. Barbee—I reject the supernatural, and my own rational philosophy is founded on proven science. But I still believe in hell.” The dark man smiled. “For every man manufactures his own private hell and peoples it with demons of his own creation, to torment him for his own secret sins, imagined or real. It’s my business to explore those personal hells and expose their demons for what they are. Usually they turn out to be much less terrifying than they seem.”"

"And introvert is one of the harmless scientific terms he used to use when he was really writing about witches."

"Quietly she said: “I know I’m not insane.” So, Barbee understood, did all lunatics."

"“I wonder—?” whispered April Bell, her long eyes narrowed and dark. “I wonder what they really found?” “Whatever it is,” breathed Barbee, “the find doesn’t seem to have made them very happy. A fundamentalist might think they had stumbled into hell.” “No,” the girl said, “men aren’t that much afraid of hell.”"

"Human knowledge is never entirely consistent or complete, because the human brain is only a crude and transient mass of watery cells, error-prone and glacier-slow."

"Human belief is seldom related to truth."

"Getting back at last to our initial question: Will academe kill SF? I don’t think so… I do suspect that the critics are luring a few promising writers into the formless indulgence and the willful obscurity that has destroyed the popularity of modern poetry."

"Considering the uses of science fiction, I think it must first of all offer entertainment, before the the futurology or the social comment can matter. For most readers, entertainment means escape. Though a few young writers are scornful of the, creating good escape fiction is a high and admirable art. Even when the writer aims at something more, entertainment is basic. The bored reader is lost."

"Science fiction, as I like to define it, is fiction based on the imagined exploration of scientific possibility. The distinction from fantasy—or from other sorts of fantasy—lies in the word possibility."

"Accelerating change has become almost the first fact of life."

"SF still appeals to the young, as always, because so much of it is set in the futures in which they will be living."

"The criticism of SF has tapped rich new vines for researchers, and I can think of writers who seem to be trying harder to impress the critics than to please their readers. I’m afraid the critical tail has begun to wag the creative dog."

"Two weeks passed, by the time of the ship—physiological time, that measured by heartbeats and all bodily rhythms, in which the span of life moved relentlessly toward its end, regardless of motion backward or forward along the time dimension."

"(should be on every college syllabus:) Something by a non-white writer, something by a queer writer, and something by a non-American writer. For starters. (2022)"

"I don't know that art by itself is enough to sort of magically change people's minds, but what I hope is that if it can get people questioning and thinking and connecting with other people, that might be something that will get them to take action. I think art can touch us emotionally sometimes. It kind of blindsides us, but in a good way. And when you sit with those feelings, that might be one of the things that pushes you in the right direction. (2022)"

"words...carry these layers of stories with them, inside them, and...they're always changing. (2022)"

"When a book is explicitly about how marginalized culture and dominant culture interact, it’s much harder to stay detached and voyeuristic. If you’re white, for instance, you may end up asking yourself hard questions: “What do I think about how these white characters—who resemble me—behave? Do I act this way? What’s my place in the system?” You’re asked to think in terms of the larger picture, and you can’t pretend that a marginalized group’s experience is totally separate and other from yours—because, in fact, it isn’t."

"Your experience has so much to do with how you view difference and how you approach being in the world. For example, in the grocery store, if someone comes down the aisle, I always preemptively move to the side—I’ve had many experiences where I get a glare or a huffy scolding or even a racial slur if the person feels I’m in the way. My parents did the same; years of experience as part of a racial minority taught them that to be noticed often means being harassed, so they try to avoid attention of any kind. On the other hand my husband, who is white, continues whatever he’s doing. His reasoning is ‘If I’m in the way, they’ll just ask me to move,’ and he’s right. The world treats him differently, so he sees it very differently."

"I think even if I did try to write something that had nothing to do with women or race, which are two pretty broad topics, I don’t know how I would do that. I don’t think there’s a way that I could write a buddy cop drama, or something really far from anything I’ve written, that didn’t have pieces of race and gender. Those are parts of the world we live in, and they are things I think about. It all comes into the voice of your writing, and you can’t write about someone else’s voice. You can only write in your own."

"I started tweeting more about social issues that were close to me—Asian American representation, LGBTQ rights, and compassion—as I started to get more well-known. It just seemed to me that if people were listening, I owed it to others to try and speak about something that mattered, and call attention to things that were getting overlooked. You could say I became much more political with the advent of the 2016 election, when the stakes became much higher for me as a woman, a woman of color, and a child of immigrants. But really I’ve always been political, because when you’re in any marginalized group, your existence is politicized for you, whether you like it or not. (2017)"

"It’s tricky to write about your hometown the same way it’s tricky to write about your family: sometimes you are so close that you can’t see them properly. And it’s hard to be emotionally honest, as well. I loved—and love—Shaker Heights, so I want to portray it lovingly. At the same time, it has its faults like any community, and I wanted to try and be clear-eyed about that. (2017)"

"I have an interest in the outsider…In fiction you’re not often writing about the typical, you are interested in outliers, the points of interest. Part of it comes from feeling I was the only Asian or person of colour … another part comes from my personality: I’m an introvert, and my usual survival mode in a large group is to stand by a wall and watch everybody."

"All up and down the street the houses looked like any others—but inside them were people who might be happy, or taking refuge, or steeling themselves to go out into the world, searching for something better. So many lives she would never know about, unfolding behind those doors. (Chapter 20, p335)"

"She wondered if they'd ever get back to normal, if things would ever be the same between them. Sex changed things, she realized-not just between you and the other person, but between you and everyone. (chapter 19 p304)"

"“Sometimes, just when you think everything’s gone, you find a way...Like after a prairie fire...It seems like the end of the world. The earth is all scorched and black and everything green is gone. But after the burning, the soil is richer, and new things can grow....People are like that, too, you know. They start over. They find a way.” (Chapter 18, p295)"

"He felt as if he’d dived into a deep, clear lake and discovered it was a shallow, knee-deep pond. What did you do? Well, you stood up. You rinsed your mud-caked knees and pulled your feet out of the muck. And you were more cautious after that. You knew, from then on, that the world was a smaller place than you’d expected. (Chapter 17, p275)"

"the problem with rules...was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time they were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure what side of the line you stood on. (chapter 16, p269)"

"It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love? (Chapter 16, p258)"

"“Most of the time, everyone deserves more than one chance. We all do things we regret now and then. You just have to carry them with you.” (chapter 15 p250)"

"Everything, she noticed, seemed capable of transmogrification. Even the two boulders in the backyard sometimes turned to silver in the early morning sunlight. In the books she read, every stream might be a river god, every tree a dryad in disguise, every old woman a powerful fairy, every pebble an enchanted soul. Anything had the potential to transform, and this, to her, seemed the true meaning of art. (chapter 13 p188)"

"To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all at the same time. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she'd been and the child she'd become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It made your head spin. It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again. (Chapter 9, p122)"

"ANGER IS FEAR’S BODYGUARD, a poster in the hospital had read (Chapter 9, p110)"

"The photos stirred feelings she couldn't quite frame in words, and this, she decided, must mean they were true works of art. (p99)"

"When she asked Mia how she knew which images to put together, Mia shook her head. "I don't," she said. "This-this is how I figure out what I think...I don't have a plan, I'm afraid," she said..."But then, no one really does, no matter what they say." (Chapter 8, p91)"

"“Everyone sees race, Lex," said Moody. "The only difference is who pretends not to.” (Chapter 4, p42)"

"At that moment [he] had a sudden clear understanding of what had already happened that morning: his life had been divided into a before and an after, and he would always be comparing the two. (chapter 2 p21)"

"Everyone on Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle,the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down. All spring the gossip had been about little Mirabelle McCullough--or, depending which side you are on, May Ling Chow--and now, at last, there was something new and sensational to discuss. (chapter 1 first lines)"

"To those out on their own paths, setting little fires"

"In the dark they are careful of each other, as if they know they are fragile, as if they know they can break. (p283)"

"Before that she hadn’t realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it. (p273)"

"they will dissect this last evening for years to come. What had they missed that they should have seen? What small gesture, forgotten, might have changed everything? They will pick it down to the bones, wondering how this had all gone so wrong, and they will never be sure. (p271)"

"It would disappear forever from her memory of Lydia, the way memories of a lost loved one always smooth and simplify themselves, shedding complexities like scales. (p271)"

"People decide what you're like before they even get to know you” (p193)"

"Dreaming of his future, he no longer heard all the things she did not say. (p164)"

"...all of them had tried to forget it. They did not talk about it; they never mentioned it. But it lingered, like a bad smell. It had suffused them so deeply it could never wash out. (chapter six, p124)"