Essayists From The United States

"The express pulled into the Stazione Termini in Rome five minutes ahead of schedule with a feminine shriek. Ruiz found a porter with no difficulty, tipped him the standard 100 lire for his two pieces of luggage, and gave directions. The priest’s Italian was adequate, but hardly standard; it made the facchino grin with delight every time Ruiz opened his mouth. He had learned it by reading, partly in Dante, mostly in opera libretti, and consequently what he lacked in accent he made up for in flowery phrases; he was unable to ask the way to the nearest fruit stall without sounding as though he would throw himself into the Tiber unless he got an answer."

"Yet the closer he came to it, the more alert he felt; it was as though he were paying more and more attention to fewer and fewer things, so that at the heart of the mystery he would paradoxically be totally intent upon nothing at all."

"“Your concept is a tremendous network of inconsistencies.” “In what way?” the countess said, not very much interested. “It seems to be based on reverence for the young, and an extremely patient and protective attitude toward their physical and mental welfare. Yet you make them live in these huge caves, utterly out of contact with the natural world, and you teach them to be afraid of death—which of course makes them a little insane, because there is nothing anybody can do about death. It is like teaching them to be afraid of the second law of thermodynamics, just because living matter sets that law aside for a very brief period."

"He had been greatly talented once, but the loss of gifted experimenters to administrative posts was the curse of all research organizations."

"In retrospect, each of the steps toward this abyss seemed irrevocable, and yet they had all been so small!"

"“We hear you, Father,” he said surprisingly. “Yet we sense that though what you say is the truth, it is not the whole truth.”"

"Never assume that any fact is useless until it is so proven."

"Martel still did not want to believe in it, but brute experience of it forced him to, whatever his preferences."

"Telepathy and intelligence appear to be incompatible from the evolutionary point of view—if you’ve got one, you don’t seem to need the other, and they may even be evolutionary enemies."

"The tribesmen understand this very well, although they would not describe it in the same terms I have. It is simply a working part of their lives. Do you think they would continue to consult me if they found that the advice that I gave them did not work? They are uncivilized, but they are not insane."

"No exercise of will can make any of us other than what we are, or more than marginally better than who we are."

"“Look at it this way for a moment, Dr. Ware. Very roughly, there are only two general kinds of men who go into the munitions business—those without consciences, who see the business as an avenue to a great fortune, eventually to be used for something else, like Jack here—and of course there’s a subclass of those, people who do have consciences but can’t resist the money anyhow, or the knowledge, rather like Dr. Hess.” Both men stirred, but apparently both decided not to dispute their portraits. “The second kind is made up of people like me—people who actually take pleasure in the controlled production of chaos and destruction. Not sadists primarily, except in the sense that every dedicated artist is something of a sadist, willing to countenance a little or a lot of suffering—not only his own, but other people’s—for the sake of the end product.” “A familiar type, to be sure,” Ware said with a lopsided grin. “I think it was the saintly Robert Frost who said that a painting by Whistler was worth any number of old ladies.” “Engineers are like this too,” Baines said."

"He was getting to be a little old for combat or for princesses, but what was worse, he had become a lot more cynical without having become even slightly the wiser."

"You may as well go, Maurice. You can’t undo what you’ve done in any case, nor can I expect to talk to you out of whatever it is you’re planning. But I will tell you this: Your sanity is dubious."

"All but a small percentage of Americans live out of their lives without ever coming closer to murder than the daily tabloid can bring them, though magazine fiction and video confer spurious intimacy with the subject."

"Sam was too good a scientist to let that hope creep into his hypothesizing."

"Of course a sense of guilt has a threshold; at a certain level of intensity it begins to confirm the habit-pattern rather than inhibit it—"

"High intelligence did not imply superior ability to come to terms with one’s social environment; indeed, there seemed to be some sort of rough correlation between high intelligence and the accumulation of aberrations."

"The early anatomists, who laid the foundations of scientific medicine, were primarily artists; the early psychotherapists, like Freud, were primarily poets. Neither group ever cured anything, but each opened up a previously forbidden area of investigation. Both were retired to the sidelines when really hardcore knowledge began to be available."

"The subject was complex enough to nurture family splits as rancorous and as final as the theological hairsplitting which had been the bane of other ages."

"It isn’t every composer who can premier his own last opera posthumously."

"In his opinion, neither justice nor mercy were very closely related to love, let alone being identical with it—otherwise, why have three words instead of one? A metaphor is not a tautology."

"I suppose you burned the library—barbarians always do."

"The technicians thought I was crazy. Now, five months later, I’ve proved it."

"There was one wing of the conservatives, however, which had gone the 12-tone procedure one better. These men composed what was called “stochastic music,” put together by choosing each individual note by consultation with tables of random numbers. Their bible, their basic text, was a volume called Operational Aesthetics, which in turn derived from a discipline called information theory, and not one word of it seemed to touch upon any of the techniques and customs of composition known to Strauss. The ideal of this group was to produce music which would be “universal”—that is, wholly devoid of any trace of the composer’s individuality, wholly a musical expression of the universal Laws of Chance. The Laws of Chance seemed to have a style of their own, all right, but to Strauss it seemed the style of an idiot child being taught to hammer a flat piano to keep him from getting into trouble."

"“The motto of the bureau,” Weinbaum said, “is, ‘sometimes something works.’”"

"“Something tells me that this isn’t going to be as simple as it looks.” “What is?” Wald said, raising his eyebrows. “Nothing, of course. But hope springs eternal in the human spleen.”"

"Actually, there are never motives behind actions. All actions are fixed. What we call motives evidently are rationalizations by the helpless observing consciousness, which is intelligent enough to smell an event coming—and, since it cannot avert the event, instead cooks up reasons for wanting it to happen...or ascribes it to the malice of God or man."

""Pat, did they get you for the embezzling?" Harmony asked."

"A woman's love is like the morning dew. It's just as likely to settle on a horse turd as a rose."

"It's really quite simple. Mr. Isinglass robbed my father, destroyed my mother, exiled my brothers, and ruined me. If I catch him asleep I'll kill him. I do hope you like this pudding. I had to ride quite a way to find the plums."

"We choose our lovers for their flaws, you know," Mel said. "People would be bored shitless if they had to love only the good in someone they care about."

"For only the good doubt their own goodness, which is what makes them good in the first place. The bad know they are good, but the good know nothing. They spend their lives forgiving others, but they can't forgive themselves."

"[G]overnments always need enemies, even when they're not at war. If you don't have a real enemy, you make one up and spread the word. It scares the population, and when the people are scared, they tend not to step out of line."

"April 1945. My unit was in Germany, and we were the ones who liberated Dachau. Thirty thousands breathing skeletons. You've seen the pictures, but the pictures don't tell you what it was like. You have to go there and smell it for yourself; you have to be there and touch it with your own hands. Human beings did it to human beings, and they did it with a clear conscience. That was the end of mankind [...] I'm sure you've read the stories about how some of them couldn't stop eating. The starved ones. They'd thought about food for so long, they couldn't help it. They ate until their stomachs burst, and they died. Hundreds of them."

"Men don't begin to live fully until their backs are against the wall."

"That's what makes his story so impossible, David. Because he's told me the truth. (Alma to David on Hector)"

"If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it fall, does it make a sound or not? Hector had read alot of books by then, he knew all the tricks and arguments of the philosophers. If someone makes a movie and no one sees it, does the movie exist or not?"

"The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle."

"Joanna Russ has written in "Recent Feminist Utopias": "I believe that utopias are not embodiments of universal human values, but are reactive; that is, they supply in fiction what their authors believe society lacks in the here and now. The positive values stressed in the stories can reveal to us what, in the authors' eyes, is wrong with our society. Thus if the stories are familial, communal in feelings, we may safely guess that the authors see our society as isolating people from each other, especially (to judge from the number of all-female utopias in the group) women from women. If the utopias stress a feeling of harmony and connection with the natural world, the authors may be telling us that in reality they feel a lack of such connection.""

"All of Joanna Russ's novels are interesting beyond the ordinary. They ask nasty and necessary questions. They are always asking who owns things and what does it cost to survive, how and what do you eat and who do you use, what do you dare to do to make your own choices. They offer a gallery of some of the most interesting female protagonists in current fiction, women who are rarely victims and sometimes even victors, but always engaged sharply and perceptively with their fate...One advantage of working in a genre is that things have to happen, you must create a moving plot, and that discipline keeps Russ's springy intelligence at least somewhat anchored. If she is like any other writer, she makes me think sometimes of Swift. She is as angry, as disgusted, as playful, as often didactic, as airy at times and as crude, as intellectual. The quality of outraged, clear-sighted, pained intelligence, at once incandescent and exacerbated, is one of the major experiences for me in reading her work. Her critical essays tend to be witty and savage. Boredom is a torture to which the world obviously condemns her a lot."

"I didn't say I was afraid of dying, I answered, I said that I was afraid to get on a plane. There is a difference. (David to Dr. Singh)"

"Joanna Russ is a brilliant writer, a writer of real moral passion and high wit."

"She had much more intellectual training and intellectual capacity for thinking about science fiction than most writers ever bother with...I think it would be fair to say that she and Samuel Delany, between them, invented science fiction scholarship back in the ’60s and ’70s...In her science fiction reviews, she was always wanting the people she thought were good to be better, to be more intellectual and more challenging."

"There was a hostility toward Joanna’s writing from male critics and male magazine editors, and men in general in science fiction. She had some friends, but quite a lot of the men in science fiction were appalled at the way that Joanna was challenging the norms of what women should be in science fiction."

"Joanna Russ told me the same thing that when she was in high school she thought if she didn't write about men going off to war or hunting big game then she didn't have anything significant to say."

"Every time my nose gushed blood, I felt like a little boy who'd wet his pants. I jumped out of the chair, pressed a handkerchief against my face, and hustled toward the nearest bathroom [...] How red the blood looked against the whiteness of the porcelain sink, I thought. How vividly imagined that color was, how aesthetically shocking. The other fluids that came out of us were dull in comparison, the palest of squirts. Whitish spittle, milky semen, yellow pee, green-brown mucus. We excreted autumn and winter colors, but running invisibly through our veins, the very stuff that kept us alive, was the crimson of a mad artist—a red as brilliant as fresh paint."

"Every culture will find justification for everything they believe or want to believe. I still think that a lot of the world is still in shock, and I think probably what brought it on was easier birth control. The sort of, where are we, what do we do now?"

"It’s still very much a different world for men and women."

"It’s that idea of disguise that I find myself coming back to. You can really, in a sense, be anybody or anybodies, plural, in writing."