Novelists From The United States

"I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me."

"No, we are not related. No, we are not related. Do I walk? Have I feet still? I raise my eyes, I let them move round, and turn myself with them, one circle, one circle, and I stand in the midst. All is as usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky has died. Then I know nothing more."

"I often sit over against myself, as before a stranger, and wonder how the unnameable active principle that calls itself to life has adapted itself even to this form. All other expressions live in a winter sleep, life is simply one continual watch against the menace of death;—it has transformed us into unthinking animals in order to give us the weapon of instinct—it has reinforced us with dullness, so that we do not go to pieces before the horror, which would overwhelm us if we had clear, conscious thought—it has awakened in us the sense of comradeship, so that we escape the abyss of solitude—it has lent us the indifference of wild creatures, so that in spite of all, we perceive the positive in every moment, and store it up as a reserve against the onslaught of nothingness."

"We march up, moody or good-tempered soldiers — we reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animals."

"A hospital alone shows what war is."

"Aber das ist wohl so, weil ein einzelner immer der Tod ist — und zwei Millionen immer nur eine Statistik."

"But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony — Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?"

"Tjaden reappears. He is still quite excited and again joins the conversation, wondering just how a war gets started. "Mostly by one country badly offending another," answers Albert with a slight air of superiority. Then Tjaden pretends to be obtuse. "A country? I don't follow. A mountain in Germany cannot offend a mountain in France. Or a river, or a wood, or a field of wheat." "Are you really as stupid as that, or are you just pulling my leg?" growls Kropp. "I don't mean that at all. One people offends the other—" "Then I haven't any business here at all," replies Tjaden, "I don't feel myself offended." "Well, let me tell you," says Albert sourly, "it doesn't apply to tramps like you." "Then I can be going home right away," retorts Tjaden, and we all laugh."

"A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends."

"It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is often brought on by small men. They are so much more energetic and uncompromising than the big fellows."

"It is when one is alone that one begins to observe Nature and to love her."

"It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I might have been smashed to atoms, and in the open may survive ten hours' bombardment unscathed. No soldier survives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck."

"The universe and Claudio Bianchi had agreed long ago to leave one another alone, and he was grateful, knowing very well how rare such a bargain is, and how rarely kept. And if he had any complaints, he made sure that neither the universe nor he himself ever knew of them."

"You are not mean. Cranky is different."

"He was only mildly startled that la strega was aware of his relationship with Giovanna: having lived most of his life in or near small southern villages, he would have been far more surprised if she had not."

"He gave them no titles; he never saw the point of doing so. If a poem did not tell you immediately what it was about, then, to Claudio Bianchi, it needed more help than a label was likely to provide."

"There are no happy endings because nothing ends."

"Don't look back, and don't run. You must never run from anything immortal; it attracts their attention."

"I am the only Unicorn there is? The Last? … That cannot be. Why would I be the last? What do men know? Because they have seen no unicorns for a while does not mean we have all vanished. We do not vanish. … There has never been a time without unicorns. We live forever! We are as old as the sky, old as the moon! We can be hunted, trapped; we can even be killed if we leave our forests, but we do not vanish. … Am I truly the last?"

"My people are in the world again. No sorrow will live in my heart as long as that joy — save one, and I thank you for that, too."

"Schmendrick stepped out into the open and said a few words. They were short words, undistinguished either by melody or harshness, and Schmendrick himself could not hear them for the Red Bull's dreadful bawling. But he knew what they meant, and he knew exactly how to say them, and he knew that he could say them again when he wanted to, in the same way or in a different way. Now he spoke them gently and with joy, and as did so he felt his immortality fall from him like an armour, or like a shroud."

"The true secret in being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. … Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a very long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story."

"I am infected with life and will die of it in time."

"The one delusion you never had in your life was the one about the permanence of happiness."

"Love is not an excuse for bad taste."

"He sighed, telling himself that the inevitable is a great blessing to a man weary of making choices."

"What can I tell you, Laura? That I confused justice and revenge? People do that a great deal, and they always have."

"There is no such thing as abstract justice. There is such a thing as law. The difference should be apparent."

"Funny that I should become such a great believer in justice. I always used to open my history courses by telling the students that if they expected to hear a series of movie scenarios, with the good guys winning in the end, they might as well all go home because not only didn’t the good guys win, but there weren’t any good guys."

"“I’ll tell you something. Once I was very fond of a poem by Emily Dickinson or somebody. I only remember one line of it, but it goes, ‘The soul selects her own society.’ I used to tell it to everybody. Once I quoted it to a friend of mine, and he said, ’Maybe, but the body gets thrown into bed with the goddamnedest people.’”"

"It’s like marriage. The race there is between total knowledge of each other and death. If death comes first, it’s considered a successful marriage."

"Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets."

"If I sound petty and malicious, it’s because I am."

"He had foreseen every such change in his fortune, ignored it always, and called the refusal innocence."

"I was lost too. What else would I have been doing in Iowa?"

"Now is it their friendship I want, he wondered, or their dependency?…Am I so tired and so purposeless that I want to keep them with me forever, living off their need and their loneliness? You can’t do that, Jonathan. They are minds, and you cannot make minds dependent on you. That would surely make you the devil."

"Forget it, Jonathan, and go back to sleep. And before you go to sleep, pray that no well-meaning god ever makes you immortal."

"There are honest people in the world, but only because the devil considers their asking prices ridiculous."

"Beautiful is a word for young people. Beauty is a phase you grow through, like acne."

"You’re greediest when you’re born, and after that it’s downhill all the way. Live to be two hundred and you wouldn’t demand anything."

"Goddam organizers, he thought. You get something good going, and somebody comes along and organizes it. He told himself that this was inevitable, the way of the world, but it bothered him. The raven would have been in favor of a movement in the general direction of chaos, consternation, and disorganization, had he not known that such a project would require the most organization of all. Besides, there would undoubtedly be a squirrel running it."

"I walked a long way that night, thinking many philosophic thoughts which, fortunately, I don’t remember."

"I’m sure I’ll go to heaven. I’ve been dull enough."

"He knew very well that the great majority of human conversation is meaningless. A man can get through most of his days on stock answers to stock questions, he thought. Once he catches onto the game, he can manage with an assortment of grunts. This would not be so if people listened to each other, but they don’t. They know that no one is going to say anything moving and important to them at that very moment. Anything important will be announced in the newspapers and reprinted for those who missed it. No one really wants to know how his neighbor is feeling, but he asks him anyway, because it is polite, and because he knows that his neighbor certainly will not tell him how he feels. What this woman and I say to each other is not important. It is the simple making of sounds that pleases us."

"It was an old trick, one he remembered from every discussion and bull session he had ever taken part in: if you don’t know, make it up. Nobody ever admitted he didn’t know a quotation, or a book, or an essay on something. The rule also had a corollary: if you’re not sure, it’s Marlowe."

"I’ve always thought cemeteries were like cities. There are streets, avenues—you’ve seen them, I think, Michael. There are blocks, too, and house numbers, slums and ghettos, middle-class sections and small palaces."

"He had always detested funerals and avoided them as much as possible. But it’s different, he thought, when it’s your own funeral. You feel it’s one of those occasions that shouldn’t be missed."

"“The dead,” he had said once, “need nothing from the living, and the living can give nothing to the dead.” At twenty-two, it had sounded precocious; at thirty-four, it sounded mature, and this pleased Michael very much. He had liked being mature and reasonable. He disliked ritual and pomposity, routine and false emotion, rhetoric and sweeping gestures. Crowds made him nervous. Pageantry offended him. Essentially a romantic, he had put away the trappings of romance, although he had loved them deeply and never known."

"“Ravens bring things to people. We’re like that. It’s our nature. We don’t like it. We’d much rather be eagles, or swans, or even one of those moronic robins, but we’re ravens and there you are. Ravens don’t feel right without somebody to bring things to, and when we do find somebody we realize what a silly business it was in the first place.” He made a sound between a chuckle and a cough. “Ravens are pretty neurotic birds. We’re closer to people than any other bird, and we’re bound to them all our lives, but we don’t have to like them. You think we brought Elijah food because we liked him? He was an old man with a dirty beard.”"

"“There are people,” he said, “who give, and there are people who take. There are people who create, people who destroy, and people who don’t do anything and drive the other two kinds crazy. It’s born in you, whether you give or take, and that’s the way you are.”"