Novelists From The United States

"Why couldn't she stop talking? Did all lonely people have that problem?"

"Late in the afternoon the company cooks brought food up to the village for the first hot meal they'd had since Belgium - salmon patties, dehydrated potatoes, and canned fruit salad - and most of the men seemed in high spirits as they sat or squatted over their mess kits in the street. "What kind of catshit is this?" "Salmon-patty catshit, that's what kind.""

"After a while he stopped listening. His ears took in only the rise and fall of her voice, the elaborate, familiar, endless rhythm of it; but from long experience he was able to say "Oh yes" or "Of course," in all the right places."

"You know?" he said. "This is the kind of thing that really—" he paused, examining the wisp of smoke that curled from his wet pipestem. "Really makes you stop and think."

"I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occurred to them to do anything less than perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super-people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I'd suddenly know that I belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I'd been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in the meantime had been a mistake; and they'd know it too. I'd be like the ugly duckling among the swans."

"Wow," he said. "Now you've said it. The hopeless emptiness. Hell, plenty of people are on to the emptiness part; out where I used to work, on the Coast, that's all we ever talked about. We'd sit around talking about emptiness all night. Nobody ever said 'hopeless', though; that's where we'd chicken out. Because maybe it does take a certain amount of guts to see the emptiness, but it takes a whole hell of a lot more to see the hopelessness. And I guess when you do see the hopelessness, that's where there's nothing to do but take off. If you can."

"How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their gray-flecked crew cuts and their button-down collars and their brisk little hurrying feet! There were endless desperate swarms of them, hurrying through the station and the streets, and an hour from now they would all be still. The waiting mid-town office buildings would swallow them up and contain them, so that to stand in one tower looking out across the canyon to another would be to inspect a great silent insectarium displaying hundreds of tiny pink men in white shirts, forever shifting papers and frowning into telephones, acting out their passionate little dumb show under the supreme indifference of the rolling spring clouds."

"I mean talk about decadence," he declared, "how decadent can a society get? Look at it this way. This country's probably the psychiatric, psychoanalytical capital of the world."

"Through weary, wasting years men have destroyed, dashed in pieces, and overthrown, but to-day we stand on the threshold of woman's era, and woman's work is grandly constructive. In her hand are possibilities whose use or abuse must tell upon the political life of the nation, and send their influence for good or evil across the track of unborn ages."

"If the fifteenth century discovered America to the Old World, the nineteenth is discovering woman to herself."

"More than the changing of institutions we need the development of a national conscience, and the upbuilding of national character. Men may boast of the aristocracy of blood, may glory in the aristocracy of talent, and be proud of the aristocracy of wealth, but there is one aristocracy which must ever outrank them all, and that is the aristocracy of character"

"So close is the bond between man and woman that you can not raise one without lifting the other. The world can not move without woman's sharing in the movement."

"The truly polite woman has no snub in her voice nor scorn upon her lips for those who occupy a lower social grade than herself. Nor will she thoughtlessly and carelessly shut the door of opportunity in the face of any one who is striving to rise in the scale of character, and build, over a sad past, more stately temples of thought and action. True politeness is consistent with perfect sincerity. If we are true to ourselves, we cannot be false to others. "I will tell this story,' said a person in the presence of General Grant, "as there are no ladies present." "But," replied the general, "there are gentlemen here." The man who could crush down defeat and organize victories had the manly politeness to guard the ears of others from being assaulted by unbecoming words."

"One hundred years ago and Africa was the privileged hunting-ground of Europe and America, and the flag of different nations hung a sign of death on the coasts of Congo and Guinea, and for years unbroken silence had hung around the horrors of the African slave-trade."

"As the saffron tints and crimson flushes of morn herald the coming day, so the social and political advancement which woman has already gained bears the promise of the rising of the full-orbed sun of emancipation. The result will be not to make home less happy, but society more holy; yet I do not think the mere extension of the ballot a panacea for all the ills of our national life. What we need to-day is not simply more voters, but better voters."

"In coming into her political estate woman will find a mass of illiteracy to be dispelled. If knowledge is power, ignorance is also power."

"I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, who has behind him ages of education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read."

"power without righteousness is one of the most dangerous forces in the world"

"Great evils stare us in the face that need to be throttled by the combined power of an upright manhood and an enlightened womanhood; and I know that no nation can gain its full measure of enlightenment and happiness if one-half of it is free and the other half is fettered."

"A wrong done to the weak should be an insult to the strong"

"How can any woman send petitions to Russia against the horrors of Siberian prisons if, ages after the Inquisition has ceased to devise its tortures, she has not done all she could by influence, tongue, and pen to keep men from making bonfires of the bodies of real or supposed criminals?"

"Let the hearts of the women of the world respond to the song of the herald angels of peace on earth and good will to men. Let them throb as one heart unified by the grand and holy purpose of uplifting the human race, and humanity will breathe freer, and the world grow brighter. With such a purpose Eden would spring up in our path, and Paradise be around our way."

"I feel I am something of a novice upon this platform. Born of a race whose inheritance has been outrage and wrong, most of my life had been spent in battling against those wrongs."

"I tried to keep my children together. But my husband died in debt; and before he had been in his grave three months, the administrator had swept the very milk crocks and wash tubs from my hands. I was a farmer's wife and made butter for the Columbus market; but what could I do, when they had swept all away?"

"Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, during a discussion of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the continued exclusion of women from the ballot, she had remarked that "when it was a question of race, she let the lesser question go. But the white women all go for sex, letting race occupy a minor position.'"

"Talk of giving women the ballot-box? Go on. It is a normal school, and the white women of this country need it. While there exists this brutal element in society which tramples upon the feeble and treads down the weak, I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America."

"We have a woman in our country who has received the name of "Moses," not by lying about it, but by acting out -a woman who has gone down into the Egypt of slavery and brought out hundreds of our people into liberty. The last time I saw that woman, her hands were swollen. That woman who had led one of Montgomery's most successful expeditions, who was brave enough and secretive enough to act as a scout for the American army, had her hands all swollen from a conflict with a brutal conductor, who undertook to eject her from her place. That woman, whose courage and bravery won a recognition from our army and from every black man in the land, is excluded from every thoroughfare of travel."

"In advocating the cause of the colored man, since the Dred Scott decision, I have sometimes said I thought the nation had touched bottom. But let me tell you there is a depth of infamy lower than that. It is when the nation, standing upon the threshold of a great peril, reached out its hands to a feebler race, and asked that race to help it, and when the peril was over, said, You are good enough for soldiers, but not good enough for citizens. When Judge Taney said that the men of my race had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, he had not seen the bones of the black man bleaching outside of Richmond. He had not seen the thinned ranks and the thickened graves of the Louisiana Second, a regiment which went into battle nine hundred strong, and came out with three hundred. He had not stood at Olustee and seen defeat and disaster crushing down the pride of our banner, until word was brought to Col. Hallowell, "The day is lost; go in and save it:" and black men stood in the gap, beat back the enemy, and saved your army."

"I felt the fight in me; but I don't want to have to fight all the time."

"I do not believe that giving the woman the ballot is immediately going to cure all the ills of life. I do not believe that white women are dew-drops just exhaled from the skies. I think that like men they may be divided into three classes, the good, the bad, and the indifferent. The good would vote according to their convictions and principles; the bad, as dictated by prejudice or malice; and the indifferent will vote on the strongest side of the question, with the winning party."

"You pressed him down for two centuries; and in so doing you crippled the moral strength and paralyzed the spiritual energies of the white men of the country. When the hands of the black were fettered, white men were deprived of the liberty of speech and the freedom of the press. Society cannot afford to neglect the enlightenment of any class of its members. At the South, the legislation of the country was in behalf of the rich slaveholders, while the poor white man was neglected."

"justice is not fulfilled so long as woman is unequal before the law. We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul. You tried that in the case of the negro."

"Had I died instead of my husband, how different would have been the result! By this time he would have had another wife, it is likely; and no administrator would have gone into his house, broken up his home, and sold his bed, and taken away his means of support."

"At the stroke of eleven on a cool April night, a woman named Joey Perrone went overboard from a luxury deck of the cruise liner M.V. Sun Duchess. Plunging toward the dark Atlantic, Joey was too dumbfounded to panic. I married an asshole, she thought, knifing headfirst into the waves. (Chapter 1)"

"Honey, sometimes you’re going to be faced with situations where the line isn’t clear between what’s right and what’s wrong. Your heart will tell you to do one thing, and your brain will tell you to do something different. In the end, all that’s left is to look at both sides and go with your best judgment. (Chapter 13)"

"To meet someone with genuine political ideals was a rarity in Stoat's line of work. As a lobbyist, he had long ago concluded that there was no difference in how Democrats and Republicans conducted the business of government. The game stayed the same; it was always about favors and friends and who controlled the dough. Party labels were merely a way to keep track of the teams; issues were mostly smoke and vaudeville. Nobody believed in anything except hanging on to power, whatever it took. So at election time, Stoat advised his clients to hedge generously by donating large sums to all sides. The strategy was as immensely pragmatic as it was cynical. Stoat himself was registered independent, but he hadn't stepped inside a voting booth in fourteen years. He couldn't take the concept seriously; he knew too much. (Chapter 5)"

"Chub's real name was Onus Dean Gillespie. The youngest of seven children, he was born to Moira Gillespie when she was forty-seven, her maternal stirrings long dormant. Onus's father, Greve, was a blunt-spoken man who regularly reminded the boy that the arc of his life had begun with a faulty diaphragm, and that his appearance in Mrs. Gillespie's womb had been as welcome as "a cockroach on a wedding cake." Still, Onus was neither beaten nor deprived as a child. Greve Gillespie made good money as a timber man in northern Georgia and was generous with his family. They lived in a large house with a basketball hoop in the driveway, a second-hand ski boat in the garage, and a deluxe set of World Book encyclopedias in the basement. All of Onus's siblings made it to Georgia State University, and Onus himself could have gone there too, had he not by age fifteen chosen a life of sloth, inebriation and illiteracy. (Chapter 7)"

""In my business, fear is a sane and very healthy emotion. That's because death and disaster aren't abstractions. They're as goddamn real as real can be." (Chapter 5)"

"Bodean James Gazzer had spent thirty-one years perfecting the art of assigning blame. His personal credo - everything bad that happens is someone else's fault - could, with imagination, be stretched to fit any circumstance. Bode stretched it. The intestinal unrest that occasionally afflicted him surely was the result of drinking milk taken from secretly radiated cows. The roaches in his apartment were planted by his filthy immigrant next-door neighbors. His dire financial plight was caused by runaway bank computers and conniving Wall Street Zionists; his bad luck in the South Florida job market, prejudice against English-speaking applicants. Even the lousy weather had a culprit: air pollution from Canada, diluting the ozone and derailing the jet stream. (Chapter 2)"

""Those who ignore history," Moldowsky said, "are doomed to get their nuts cut." (Chapter 23)"

""But she's just a stripper." Moldowsky grabbed Dilbeck's shirt. "Fanne Fox," he said, "was 'just a stripper.' Donna Rice was just a model-slash-actress. Elizabeth Ray was just a secretary who couldn't type. Gennifer Flowers was just a country singer. Don't you get it? Ask Chuck Robb. Or that horny idiot Hart. Teddy Kennedy for pity's sake. They'll all tell you the same: in politics, stealing is trouble, but pussy is lethal." (Chapter 23)"

"Malcolm J. Moldowsky did not hesitate to address United States Congressman Dave Dilbeck as "a card-carrying shithead." (Chapter 2)"

"Reluctantly Jake Harp had agreed to play nine holes. He didn't like golf with rich duffers, but it was part of the deal. Playing with Francis X. Kingsbury, though, was a special form of torture. All he talked about was Disney this and Disney that. If the stock had dropped a point or two, Kingsbury was euphoric. If the stock was up, he was bellicose and depressed. He referred to the Disney mascot as Mickey Ratface, or sometimes simply The Rat. (Chapter 13)"

"Like many wildly successful Floridians, Francis X. Kingsbury was a transplant. He had moved to the Sunshine State in balding middle age, alone and uprooted, never expecting that he would become a multimillionaire. And like so many new Floridians, Kingsbury was a felon on the run. Before moving to Miami, he was known by his real name of Frankie King. Not Frank, but Frankie. His mother had named him after the singer Frankie Lane. All his life, Frankie King had yearned to change his name to something more distinguished, something with weight and social bearing. A racketeering indictment--seventeen counts--out of Brooklyn was as good an excuse as any. (Chapter 5)"

"Like everything else at the Amazing Kingdom, the Vole Project had begun as a scheme to compete with Walt Disney World. Years earlier, Disney had tried to save the dusky seaside sparrow, a small marsh bird whose habitat was being wiped out by over-development along Florida's coastline. With much fanfare, Disney had unveiled a captive breeding program for the last two surviving specimens of the dusky. Unfortunately, the last two surviving specimens were both males, and even the wizards of Disney could not induce the scientific miracle of homosexual procreation. Eventually the sparrow fell to extinction, but the Disney organization won gobs of fawning publicity for its conservation efforts. (Chapter 2)"

"[Rudy] didn't give two hoots about certification by the American Board of Plastic Surgery, or the American Board of Facial and Reconstructive Surgery, or the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons. What were a couple more snotty plaques on the wall? His patients could care less. They were rich and vain and impatient. In some exclusive South Florida circles, Rudy's name carried the glossy imprimatur of a Gucci or a de la Renta. The lacquered old crones at La Gorce or the Biltmore would point at each other's shiny chins and taut necks and sculpted eyelids and ask, not in a whisper, but in a haughty bray, "is that a Graveline?" Rudy was a designer surgeon. To have him suck your fat was an honor, a social plum, a mark (literally) of status. Only a boor, white trash or worse, would ever question the man's techniques or complain about the results. (Chapter 30)"

"In the past he had always counted on Christina to worry about the actual nuts-and-bolts journalism of the program. It was Christina who did the reporting, blocked out the interviews, arranged for the climactic confrontations--she even wrote the scripts. Reynaldo Flemm was hopelessly bored by detail, research, and the rigors of fact-checking. He was an action guy, and he saved his energy for when the tape was rolling. (Chapter 25)"

""You can't talk to me like that! You just remember who's the star." "And you just remember who writes all your lines, and who does all your dull, dull research. Remember who tells you what questions to ask, and who edits these pieces so you don't come off looking like a pompous airhead." Except that's exactly how Reynaldo came off, most of the time. There was no way around it, no post-production wizardry that could disguise the man's true personality on tape. (Chapter 5)"

"He won the governorship running as a Democrat, but proved to be unlike any Democrat or Republican that the state of Florida had ever seen. To the utter confusion of everyone in Tallahassee, Clinton Tyree turned out to be a completely honest man. (Chapter 10)"

"Bass magazines promote the species as the working man's fish, available to anyone within strolling distance of a lake, river, culvert, reservoir, rockpit, or drainage ditch. The bass is not picky; it is hardy, prolific, and on a given day will eat just about any God-awful lure dragged in front of its maw. As a fighter it is bullish, but tires easily; as a jumper its skills are admirable, though no match for a graceful rainbow trout or tarpon; as table fare it is blandly acceptable, even tasty when properly seasoned. Its astonishing popularity comes from a modest combination of these traits, plus the simple fact that there are so many largemouth bass swimming around that just about any damn fool can catch one. (Chapter 2)"