Novelists From New York State

"Two thousand years ago the night sky looked completely different, and so when you get right down to it, the Greek conceptions of star signs as related to birth dates are grossly inaccurate for today’s day and age. It’s called the Line of procession: back then the sun didn’t set in Taurus, but in Gemini. A September 24 birthday didn’t mean you were a Libra,but a Virgo. And there was a thirteenth zodiac constellation, Ophichus and the Serpent Bearer, which rose between Sagittarius and Scorpio for only four days. The reason it’s all off kilter? The earth’s axis wobbles. Life isn’t nearly as stable as we want it to be."

"Things don’t always look as they seem. Some stars, for example, look like bright pinholes, but when you get them pegged under a microscope for find you’re looking at a globular cluster-a million stars that, to us, presents as a single entity. On aless dramatic note there are triples, like Alpha Centauri, which up close turns out to be a double star and a red dwarf inclose proximity.There’s an indigenous tribe in Africa that tells of life coming from the second star in Alpha Centauri, the one no one can see without a high-powered observatory telescope. Come to think of it, the Greeks, the Aboriginals, and the Plains Indians all lived continents apart and all, independently, looked at the same septuplet knot of the Pleiades and believed them tobe seven young girls running away from something that threatened to hurt them.Make of it what you will."

"There are stars in the night sky that look brighter than the others, and when you look at them through a telescope you realize you are looking at twins. The two stars rotate around each other, sometimes taking nearly a hundred years to do it.They create so much gravitational pull there’s no room around for anything else. You might see a blue star, for example,and realize only later that it has a white dwarf as a companion-that first one shines so bright, by the time you notice the second one, it’s really too late."

"You don't love someone because they're perfect. You love them in spite of the fact that they're not."

"Maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it."

"If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?"

"Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them."

"If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?"

"Either Josie was someone she didn’t want to be, or she was someone who nobody wanted."

"Newborns reminded her of tiny Buddhas, faces full of divinity […] That holiness, somehow, disappeared, and Lacy was always left wondering where in this world it might go."

"The enemy was always supposed to be an outsider, not the kid who was sitting right next to you."

"Everyone broke up in laughter, as Lacy watched. Alex, she realized, could fit anywhere. Here, or with Lacy’s family at dinner, or in a courtroom, or probably at tea with the queen. She was a chameleon."

"It struck Lacy that she didn’t really know what color a chameleon was before it started changing."

"How could you change a boy’s bedding every week and feed him breakfast and drive him to the orthodontist and not know him at all?"

"Did everyone in jail think they were innocent? All this time Peter had spent lying on the bench, convincing himself that he was nothing like anyone else in the Grafton County Jail—and as it turned out, that was a lie."

"Logan Rourke wasn’t her father, not any more than the guy who’d taken their coins at the toll booth or any other stranger. You could share DNA with someone and still have nothing in common with them"

"“My daughter won’t go to school this year until eleven o’clock, because she can’t handle being there when third period starts,” the woman said. “Everything scares her. This has ruined her whole life; why should Peter Houghton’s punishment be any less?”"

"When you begin a journey of revenge, start by digging two graves: one for your enemy, and one for yourself."

"Laura Stone knew exactly how to go to hell. She could map out its geography on napkins at departmental cocktail parties; she was able to recite all the passageways and rivers and folds by heart; she was on a first-name basis with its sinners."

"For a moment Laura hesitated outside the door, wondering how she could have been naïve enough to believe this horrible thing had happened to Trixie, when in truth it had happened to all three of them."

"I was terrified of that ghost just like they were, but I never let anyone know it. That way, I knew they might call me a lot of awful names ... but one of them wasn't coward."

"Power isn't doing something terrible to someone who's weaker than you, … It's having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to."

"I would not, if I could, give up the memory of the joy I have had in books for any advantage that could be offered in other pursuits or occupations. Books have been to me what gold is to the miser, what new fields are to the explorer, what a new discovery is to the scientific student."

"On the day long after childhood when I suddenly heard of his death, the sky grew dark above my head. I was walking on a Southern highway, and a friend driving in a pony carriage passed me, stopped and said, "Have you heard that Charles Dickens is dead?" It was as if I had been robbed of one of the dearest of friends."

"Self complacency is fatal to progress."

"Mind does dominate body. We are superior to the house in which we dwell."

"My own opinion is that youthfulness of feeling is retained, as is youthfulness of appearance, by constant use of the intellect."

"Every child's birthright is a happy home."

"Let every birthday be a festival, a time when the gladness of the house finds expression in flowers, in gifts, in a little fête. Never should a birthday be passed over without note, or as if it were a common day, never should it cease to be a garlanded milestone in the road of life."

"One of the first things to be noted in business life is its imperialism. Business is exacting, engrossing, and inelastic."

"Fifteen takes its perplexities very seriously and grieves wihout restraint over its sorrows."

"Never yet was a spring-time, Late though lingered the snow, That the sap stirred not at the whisper Of the south wind, sweet and low; Never yet was a spring-time When the buds forgot to blow."

"I know,—yet my arms are empty, That fondly folded seven, And the mother heart within me Is almost starved for heaven."

"In the whole round of human affairs little is so fatal to peace as misunderstanding."

"Prose — it might be speculated — is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider’s delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds."

"The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it! — that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms — nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?"

"If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?"

"When poets — write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane."

"Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality."

"When people say there is too much violence in [my books], what they are saying is there is too much reality in life."

"If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework — you can still be writing, because you have that space."

"It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim."

"Old women snore violently. They are like bodies into which bizarre animals have crept at night; the animals are vicious, bawdy, noisy. How they snore! There is no shame to their snoring. Old women turn into old men."

"The worst cynicism: a belief in luck."

"Nothing is accidental in the universe — this is one of my Laws of Physics — except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity. So it cannot be an accident that I think of you so constantly."

"Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning."

"Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost."

"The spectacle of human beings fighting each other for whatever reason, including, at certain well-publicized times, staggering sums of money, is enormously disturbing because it violates a taboo of our civilization. Many men and women, however they steel themselves, cannot watch a boxing match because they cannot allow themselves to see what it is they are seeing. One thinks helplessly, This can’t be happening, even as, and usually quite routinely, it is happening. In this way boxing as a public spectacle is akin to pornography: in each case the spectator is made a voyeur, distanced, yet presumably intimately involved, in an event that is not supposed to happening as it is happening. The pornographic "drama," though as fraudulent as professional wrestling, makes a claim for being about something absolutely serious, if not humanly profound: it is not so much about itself as about the violation of a taboo. That the taboo is spiritual rather than physical, or sexual — that our most valuable human experience, love, is being is being desecrated, parodied, mocked — is surely at the core of our culture’s fascination with pornography."

"In any case, raw aggression is thought to be the peculiar province of men, as nurturing is the peculiar province of women... The psychologist Erik Erikson discovered that, while little girls playing with blocks generally create pleasant interior spaces and attractive entrances, little boys are inclined to pile up the blocks as high as they can and then watch them fall down: "the contemplation of ruins," Erikson observes, "is a masculine specialty.""

"Boxing has become America’s tragic theater."