Novelists From The United States

"Can’t own a woman, Mike. Wonderful companions, can’t own them."

"Around her gulps of water, she repeated her prayer, until the monotony and futility silenced her."

"“I’m going to take you out tonight,” he said. “Another Heisenberg dinner.” “What’s that?” “Uncertainty,” Edward said crisply. “We know where we are going, but not what we are going to eat. Or vice versa.” “Sounds wonderful. Which car?” “The Quantum, of course.” “Oh, Lord. We just had the speedometer fixed.” “And the steering went out?” “Shh! It’s still working. We’re cheating.”"

"There is no war so important that to win it, we must destroy our minds."

"We’ve been fighting for so long, we’ve begun to lose ourselves. And it’s getting worse."

"She saw that in all wars, the first stage was to dehumanize the enemy, reduce the enemy to a lower level so that he might be killed without compunction. When the enemy was not human to begin with, the task was easier."

"When evenly matched, you cannot win against your enemy unless you understand them. And if you truly understand, why are you fighting and not talking?"

"“We must know our enemy, at least a little.” “That’s dangerous,” Prufrax said, almost instinctively. “Yes, it is. What you know, you cannot hate.”"

"To fight an enemy properly, you have to know what they are. Ignorance is defeat."

"The battle was over. There were no victors."

"“Being scared is nothing,” the old woman said. “Being bored, or ignorant—now that’s a crime.”"

"There is nothing finer in the world than the telling of tales. Split atoms if you wish, but splitting an infinitive—and getting away with it—is far nobler. Lance boils if you wish, but pricking pretensions is often cleaner and always more fun."

"We're not prophets. We're not here to inform the rich people of the world on how to make more money, or to inform governments on how to direct themselves. We are here to allow you to dream your dreams and make them happen, and have your nightmares a little in advance so you can prevent them from happening."

"You deserve whoever governs you … Everyone is responsible for the actions of their leaders."

"I remembered being so amazed by his stories from when my parents subscribed to OMNI magazine."

"It's interesting how many science fiction writers get going when they are very young. I was on a program with Greg Bear, and he mentioned that he had gotten started writing when he was eight. And I began writing when I was ten."

"We are born in ignorance, we die in ignorance, but maybe sometimes we learn something important and pass it along to others before we die. Or we write it down in a little book."

"The Republic, despite the best efforts of the surviving government, was quickly being replaced by something worse than anarchy—passionate mob rule, directed by untutored but skilled opportunists."

"All states resort to force in the end."

"The future seemed not just dangerous, not just bleak; it seemed incomprehensible."

"The universe stores the results of its operations as nature. I do not confuse nature with reality. At a fundamental level, reality is the set of rules the results of whose interactions are nature. Part of the problem of reconciling quantum mechanics with larger-scale phenomena comes from mistaking results for rules—they have been built into our brains, good for survival, but not for physics."

"Institutions, like any organism, hate to die."

"Populists believed the people should dictate their needs to any individual who rose above the herd, and bring them low again—except of course for the leaders of whatever populist government took power, who, as political messiahs, would earn specific privileges themselves."

"With a little ceremony, and not much in the way of clothing left to remove, we celebrated still being alive."

"My level of skepticism rose enormously; I’ve always bristled when people ask for, much less demand, trust."

"Why does our sense of individuality prevent us from correcting our weaknesses?"

"The hardest theme in science fiction is that of the alien. The simplest solution of all is in fact quite profound—that the real difficulty lies not in understanding what is alien, but in understanding what is self. We are all aliens to each other, all different and divided. We are even aliens to ourselves at different stages of our lives. Do any of us remember precisely what it was like to be a baby?"

"Equal in law is not equal in nature."

"“Nobody’s ever satisfied with what they have?” “Not in human experience; not at the level of governments, nations, or planets.”"

"The slogan of those who advocated therapy was, “A sane society is a polite society.”"

"That was the myth and I admit I found it attractive. I still do. It’s been said that a romantic is someone who never accepts the evidence of her eyes and ears."

"“The train’s late. Fascists are supposed to make them run on time,” Diane said, still tapping her boot. “They never did on earth,” I said. “You mean it’s a myth?” I nodded. “So fascists aren’t good for anything?” Diane asked. “Uniforms,” I said. “Ours don’t even have good uniforms.”"

"The sorrow never dies; it is merely nacred by time."

"Alienation without must be accompanied by alienation within; that is the law for every social level, even individuals. To harm one’s fellows, even one’s enemies, harms you, takes away some essential element from your self-respect and self-image."

"Whom could I blame? Ultimately, one man who had started a strangely secular church, attracting people good and bad, faithful and cynical, starting an organization too large and too well-financed and organized to simply fade: promulgating a series of lies become sacred truths. How often had that happened in human history, and how many had suffered and died?"

"I felt myself growing older. I didn’t see it as an improvement."

"That’s what politics is all about—coercion and lies."

"“Maybe you administrators can work it all out in the council.” You administrators. That put us in our place. Paper pushers, bureaucrats, politicians. Cut the politics. We were the ones who stood in the way of the scientist’s goal of unrestrained research and intellection."

"We were innocent and did not know that the price of freedom—of individuality—is attention to politics, careful planning, careful organization; philosophy is no more a barrier against political disaster than it is against plague."

"There may be no such thing as prescience, but honed instincts are crucial in our game."

"Here was a creed without a coherent philosophy—a system without a sensible metaphysic. Here was puerile hypothesis and even outright fantasy masquerading as revealed the truth."

"Some believe a superior being has guided humans. I see no compelling evidence for this. The human wish for guidance, for confirmation and external support, is an underlying theme in all they do and say, however. Very few stray far from this most fundamental of wishes: that they might have immortal and omniscient parents."

"He wondered for a moment if they had stumbled onto something truly supernatural but dismissed that with a disgusted shudder."

"We have arisen as the result of purely natural processes; one of the great achievements of modern science has been the elimination of God or others teleologisms him as a necessity from our explanations."

"I was interested in Gertrude Stein. I loved the stories. They had drama in them."

"When this you see remember me."

"As I read it, my ears opened up for the first time in my life and I began to hear Negroes... Above all, I began to hear for the first time the pure, deep dialect of my grandmother. And from that moment on, in all my attempts at writing I was able to tap that vast reservoir of living speech that went on about me."

"Then soon after my delight with Stein was jolted; a political critic of the reddest persuasion condemned Stein in a newspaper article, calling her decadent, implying that she reclined upon a silken couch in Paris smoking hashish day and night and was a hopeless prey to hallucinations. I asked myself if I were wrong or crazy or decadent. Being simple minded, I decided upon a very practical way of determining the worth of the prose of Stein, a prose I had accepted without qualms or distress. I gathered a group of semi-illiterate Negro workers into a Chicago basement and read them Melanctha aloud. They were enthralled, interrupting me constantly to tell where and when they had met such a strange and melancholy gal. I was convinced and Miss Stein's book never bothered or frightened me after that. If Negro stockyard workers could understand the stuff when it was read aloud to them, then surely anybody else could if they wanted to read with their ears as well as their eyes. For the prose of Stein is but the repetitive contemporaneousness of our living speech woven into a grammarless form of narrative..."

"Most of us balk at her soporific rigmaroles, her echolaliac incantations, her half-witted-sounding catalogues on numbers; most of us read her less and less. Yet, remembering especially her early work, we are still always aware of her presence in the background of contemporary literature— and we picture her as the great pyramidal Buddha of Jo Davidson's statue of her, eternally and placidly ruminating the gradual developments of the process of being, registering the vibrations of a psychological country like some august human seismograph whose charts we haven't the training to read."

"American self-confidence, Emerson argued, should be grounded not in a narrow chauvinistic claim about the superiority of the American way but rather in a mature affirmation of America's gifts to the world as well as candid acknowledgment of the "most un-handsome part of our condition." Cheap American patriotism not only reflects an immaturity and insecurity, he warned, but also is an adolescent defense mechanism that reveals a fear to engage the world and learn from others. Narrow nationalism is a handmaiden of imperial rule, he argues-it keeps the populace deferential and complacent. Hence it abhors critics and dissenters like Emerson who unsettle and awaken the people. His shining example of democratic intellectual work is a challenge to us today. This challenge has been taken up through the years by a stream of Emersonian voices-from Walt Whitman to William James, Gertrude Stein. W. E. B. Du Bois, and Muriel Rukeyser...Gertrude Stein democratized her sentences in her conversational novels (like Tender Buttons) by putting a premium on verbs that dethrone the hierarchy of the conventional grammar and creating an interior monologue for her characters that got beneath superficial banter."