Novelists From Los Angeles

"But for today, yesterday, tomorrow, it is not important. Time goes on without any of us. Only a belief, a state of mind, endures, and even that changes constantly, but underneath there are two main kinds—the one that says, Here you must stop knowing, and the other which says, Learn. Right or wrong, the fruit was eaten, and there can’t ever be a going back. I have made my choice."

"With any luck. Stark smiled cynically. Not that he did not believe in luck. Rather, he had found it to be an uncertain ally."

"The man who doesn’t fear, doesn’t live long. I fear everything."

"There was a smell in the air now. The hot, close, frightening small of mob; mob excited, hungry, dreaming blood and death. The primitive in Stark knew that sweaty acridity all too well."

"The mountains dwindled away into hills covered with a dark, stunted scrub. Beyond them the land flattened out to the horizon, a treeless immensity of white and gray-green, a spongy mossiness flecked with a million icy ponds. The wind blew, sometimes hard, sometimes harder."

"I can’t tell you if the stories are true. Men lie without meaning to. They talk as if they had been part of a thing that happened to someone they never knew and only heard of by sixth remove."

"“Better to make haste slowly than not at all,” said Amnir sententiously."

"Stark did not like them. There was a touch of madness in them, born of the long dark and the too-long-held faith."

"The Thyrans came on, as merciless as time."

"Stark said wearily, “I don’t think you understand.” Normally he was tolerant of tribal fancies, but he felt no great tenderness for the Outdwellers. “The stars are already defiled. They’re only suns, like that one over your head. They have worlds around them, like this one under your feet. People live on those worlds, people who never heard of Outdwellers or their footling goddess. And the starships fly between them. It’s all going on out there, this second as you stand here, and nothing you can do will stop it.”"

"“Aren’t you even curious?” he asked. “A million worlds out there with more wonders than I could tell you in a million years, and you don’t even want to ask a question?”"

"Under the attentiveness was fear, and something else. Anger, hate—the instinctive rejection of an intolerable truth."

"A magician’s business is with words. He may use other things to help him along—amulets and so forth—but it is within words that the power lies. To choose the wrong words may mean death. And so magicians learn, from the first, to use as few words as possible, to answer as few questions as we can."

"She sat silent for a moment. The real world always lay out there waiting, ready to ambush you with something you could not control. The history you’ve made up for your own private kingdom turns out to be the national epic of some obscure country."

"That’s what’s missing, she thought. Everyone in the city is so passionate about things. Here they are only passionate about their religion. They’ve lost everything else."

"We are all tourists in each others’ lives. We all have monuments and ruins, places of strange beauty and forbidden sites chained off and locked securely so that no visitors can get in. And none of us has the guidebook to anyone else, or even the list of most commonly used phrases. We just have to get along the best we can."

"“It would make a good tourist attraction,” Mitchell said. Jara looked at him oddly, and for a moment he feared he’d said the wrong thing again. Then Jara laughed. “You Americans,” he said. “That is all you think about, your tourist attractions. You are the great spectators. The other countries of the world put on their shows for you, display their ruins, their pottery, their dances and religions. And you watch. You watch because your country has no past of its own. Is that right?” Mitchell shrugged. He had never really given it much thought. “But you are right,” Jara said. “It would make a good tourist attraction. That would be one way we could finance the excavation.” Ah ha, Mitchell thought. You laugh at the Americans, but when you need money for something we’re the first people you think of."

"She was already caught in the enchanted net of the bookshelves. She walks down rows of books about history, science, cooking, a large section devoted to car repair. Her feet on the linoleum floor, and the young man turning pages, made the only sounds in the store. It’s like drinking, Claire thought, delighted, running her fingers over the spines. Worse, because the spell lasts longer. If you read, don’t drive."

"Three of her children were in school. At some time the government had recorded that Mama had three children of school age, so every day Mama sent three different children off to school. The teachers never seemed to notice."

"Layla’s story, though not always accurate, was far more interesting than the truth."

"You really can’t choose the people you’re going to like."

"Maybe art couldn’t survive it if was sponsored by the government. Maybe art always had to be subversive."

"“Lots of people would give anything to be in your place.” “I’m not lots of people,” Mary said. “I’m me. That’s what I’ll never forgive, that you did all this without even asking me.”"

"“I can’t believe this,” Mary said, whispering urgently. “Every time I talk to you I think I’ve heard the worst, and then you come along and say something even stupider.”"

"You think you know what your life will be like thirty years from now and suddenly you’re doing something you couldn’t have planned five minutes ago."

"He knew that there could never be an apology enormous enough for what he had just said. He didn’t care. He was tired of people who told him what state his soul was in, André and Antonin and a few of the others who took their cue from André. He had gone through something, something so strange that even now he was not sure what it meant, but he knew he was somehow stronger for it. He would not give that up to be a follower again."

"“Robert, how have you been? You look good. They’ve been telling me a fantastic story, I don’t believe a word of it…” Robert sat down at the table next to Paul and ordered grenadine. “It’s all true,” he said. “Every word of it, even the parts they made up.”"

"I’ve got to live up to their expectations by acting irresponsibly again."

"Claude sighed. “All right, you’re a poet,” he said. “I don’t understand why poets can’t make the effort to get along like everyone else.” “Ah,” Robert said. “But we poets can’t understand why everyone else is making the effort.”"

"“A novel?” André laughed. “The novel’s dead—don’t waste your time. The novel takes a small—oh, infinitely small—cut-and-dried section of so-called reality and calls it art. Your life is art. Don’t waste it trying to write a novel.”"

"Movies should be silent, like dreams."

"Suddenly he didn’t care if the revolution were lost or won, only that it be over."

"They passed a closed police station. Someone had written on the wall, “It is forbidden to forbid.”"

"Collective insanity is boring. Individual insanity—that’s what interests me."

"“You can’t ask questions like that,” André said. “The unconscious has its own logic.” But he looked a little puzzled, a little too tied to the world of logic and order."

"You are wrong, Rabbi. You did not kill your daughter. And it does not matter now if you could have done something to save her or not. To think about what might have happened is useless. You can think about what might have happened, turn it over and over in your mind until you can’t think of anything else. You can plan your revenge or—or suicide. But none of that can change the past. The dead—your daughter and my parents—they would want us to go on. To live."

"You think you can be as heroic as he was, simply by dying. But he doesn’t take courage to die. That’s easy. It takes courage to live."

"Your father was a very wise man. But you cannot acquire his wisdom by pretending to have it already."

"She felt that she had seen beneath the mask of the world, and she could not quite believe in that mask again."

"How it was. How it was the earth could open up under you and swallow you whole, close above you as if you never were. Like Persephone snatched by the god. The ground opened up and out he came, sweeping her into the black chariot. Then down they plunged, under the ground, into darkness, and the earth closed over her head, and she was gone, as if she had never been."

"Don't attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention because you're lonely. Loneliness is the human condition. No one is ever going to fill that space. The best you can do is know yourself... know what you want."

"I had already seen more of the world, its beauty and misery and sheer surprise, than they could hope or fear to perceive."

"Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life. It wasn't like I didn't know where all this remembering got you, all that hunger for beauty and astonishing cruelty and ever-present-loss."

"This was an artist's stare, attentive to detail, taking in the truth without preconceptions. It was a stare that didn't turn away when I stared back, but was startled to find itself returned."

"People were just like that. We couldn't even see each other, just the shadows moving, pushed by unseen winds."

"Then came a time I can hardly describe, a section underground. A bird trapped in a sewer, wings beating against the ceiling in that dark wet place, while the city rumbled on overhead. Her name was Lost. Her name was Nobody's Daughter."