Novelists From The United States

"dance mehitabel dance caper and shake a leg what little blood is left will fizz like wine in a keg"

"well boss mehitabel the cat has reappeared in her old haunts with a flock of kittens archy she said to me yesterday the life of a female artist is continually hampered what in hell have i done to deserve all these kittens i look back on my life and it seems to me to be just one damned kitten after another i am a dancer archy and my only prayer is to be allowed to give my best to my art but just as i feel that i am succeeding in my life work along comes another batch of these damned kittens it is not archy that i am shy on mother love god knows i care for the sweet little things curse them but am i never to be allowed to live my own life i have purposely avoided matrimony in the interests of the higher life but i might just as well have been a domestic slave for all the freedom i have gained i hope none of them gets run over by an automobile my heart would bleed if anything happened to them and i found it out but it isn t fair archy it isn t fair these damned tom cats have all the fun and freedom if i was like some of these green eyed feline vamps i know i would simply walk out on the bunch of them and let them shift for themselves but i am not that kind archy i am full of mother love my kindness has always been my curse a tender heart is the cross i bear self sacrifice always and forever is my motto damn them i will make a home for the sweet innocent little things unless of course providence in his wisdom should remove them they are living just now in an abandoned garbage can just behind a made over stable in greenwich village and if it rained into the can before i could get back and rescue them i am afraid the little dears might drown it makes me shudder just to think of it of course if i were a family cat they would probably be drowned anyhow sometimes i think the kinder thing would be for me to carry the sweet little things over to the river and drop them in myself but a mother s love archy is so unreasonable something always prevents me these terrible conflicts are always presenting themselves to the artist the eternal struggle between art and life archy is something fierce yes something fierce my what a dramatic life i have lived one moment up the next moment down again but always gay archy always gay and always the lady too in spite of hell well boss it will be interesting to note just how mehitabel works out her present problem a dark mystery still broods over the manner in which the former family of three kittens disappeared one day she was talking to me of the kittens and the next day when i asked her about them she said innocently what kittens interrogation point and that was all i could ever get out of her on the subject we had a heavy rain right after she spoke to me but probably that garbage can leaks so the kittens have not yet been drowned"

"an optimist is a guy that has never had much experience"

"procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday"

"oh i should worry and fret death and i will coquette there s a dance in the old dame yet toujours gai toujours gai"

"the octopus's secret wish is not to be a formal fish he dreams that some time he may grow another set of legs or so and be a broadway music show"

"dedicated to babs with babs knows what and babs knows why"

"The individual aspiration is always defeated of its perfect fruition and expression, but it is never lost; it passes into the conglomerate being of the race. The way to encourage yourself about the human race is to look at it first from a distance; look at the lights on the high spots."

"The wise and subtle deities permit nothing worthy to be lost. It was with no thought of beauty that the builders labored; no conscious thought; they were masters or slaves in the bitter wars of commerce, and they never saw as a whole what they were making; no one of them did. But each one had had his dream. And the baffled dreams and the broken visions and the ruined hopes and the secret desires of each one labored with him as he labored; the things that were lost and beaten and trampled down went into the stone and steel and gave it soul: the aspiration denied and the hope abandoned and the vision defeated were the things that lived, and not the apparent purpose for which each one of all the millions sweat and toiled or cheated; the hidden things, the silent things, the winged things, so weak they are easily killed, the unacknowledged things, the rejected beauty, the strangled appreciation, the inchoate art, the submerged spirit — these groped and found each other and gathered themselves together and worked themselves into the tiles and mortar of the edifice and made a town that is a worthy fellow of the sunrise and the sea winds. Humanity triumphs over its details."

"Men could not think of THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE if they did not have it in them ultimately to create THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE."

"The best good that you can possibly achieve is not good enough if you have to strain yourself all the time to reach it. A thing is only worth doing, and doing again and again, if you can do it rather easily, and get some joy out of it. Do the best you can, without straining yourself too much and too continuously, and leave the rest to God. If you strain yourself too much you'll have to ask God to patch you up. And for all you know, patching you up may take time that it was planned to use some other way. BUT . . . overstrain yourself now and then. For this reason: The things you create easily and joyously will not continue to come easily and joyously unless you yourself are getting bigger all the time. And when you overstrain yourself you are assisting in the creation of a new self — if you get what we mean."

"We shall know that the Almost Perfect State is here when the kind of old age each person wants is possible to him. Of course, all of you may not want the kind we want . . . some of you may prefer prunes and morality to the bitter end."

"We have always been compelled, and we shall be compelled for many years to come, to be prudent, cautious, staid, sober, conservative, industrious, respectful of established institutions, a model citizen. We have not liked it, but we have been unable to escape it. Our mind, our logical faculties, our observation, inform us that the conservatives have the right side of the argument in all human affairs. But the people whom we really prefer as associates, though we do not approve their ideas, are the rebels, the radicals, the wastrels, the vicious, the poets, the Bolshevists, the idealists, the nuts, the Lucifers, the agreeable good-for-nothings, the sentimentalists, the prophets, the freaks. We have never dared to know any of them, far less become intimate with them."

"Between the years of ninety-two and a hundred and two, however, we shall be the ribald, useless, drunken, outcast person we have always wished to be. We shall have a long white beard and long white hair; we shall not walk at all, but recline in a wheel chair and bellow for alcoholic beverages; in the winter we shall sit before the fire with our feet in a bucket of hot water, a decanter of corn whiskey near at hand, and write ribald songs against organized society; strapped to one arm of our chair will be a forty-five calibre revolver, and we shall shoot out the lights when we want to go to sleep, instead of turning them off; when we want air we shall throw a silver candlestick through the front window and be damned to it; we shall address public meetings (to which we have been invited because of our wisdom) in a vein of jocund malice. We shall … but we don’t wish to make any one envious of the good time that is coming to us … We look forward to a disreputable, vigorous, unhonoured, and disorderly old age."

"Personally we look forward to an old age of dissipation and indolence and unreverend disrepute. In fifty years we shall be ninety-two years old. We intend to work rather hard during those fifty years and accumulate enough to live on without working any more for the next ten years, for we have determined to die at the age of one hundred and two."

"Of middle age the best that can be said is that a middle aged person has likely learned how to have a little fun in spite of his troubles. It is to old age that we look for reimbursement, the most of us. And most of us look in vain. For the most of us have been wrenched and racked, in one way or another, until old age is the most trying time of all. In the Almost Perfect State every person shall have at least ten years before he dies of easy, carefree, happy living . . . things will be so arranged economically that this will be possible for each individual."

"Infancy is not what it is cracked up to be. The child seems happy all the time to the adult, because the adult knows that the child is untouched by the real problems of life; if the adult were similarly untouched he is sure that he would be happy. But children, not knowing that they are having an easy time, have a good many hard times. Growing and learning and obeying the rules of their elders, or fighting against them, are not easy things to do."

"No matter how nearly perfect an Almost Perfect State may be, it is not nearly enough perfect unless the individuals who compose it can, somewhere between death and birth, have a perfectly corking time for a few years. The most wonderful governmental system in the world does not attract us, as a system; we are after a system that scarcely knows it is a system; the great thing is to have the largest number of individuals as happy as may be, for a little while at least, some time before they die."

"A demagogue is a person with whom we disagree as to which gang should mismanage the country."

"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you."

"I have noticed that when chickens quit quarreling over their food they often find that there is enough for all of them i wonder if it might not be the same with the human race"

"A book is a gift you can open again and again."

"Going to church no more makes you a Christian than standing in a garage makes you a car."

"That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."

"It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my home town, out on the edge of the prairie..."

"Librarians, Dusty, possess a vast store of politeness. These are people who get asked regularly the dumbest questions on God's green earth. These people tolerate every kind of crank and eccentric and mouth-breather there is."

"I want to resume the life of a shy person."

"We made our mistakes back in the 20th century, Lord knows, but we never nominated a man for president who brags about not reading. Calvin Coolidge had his limits. Warren G. Harding spent more time on his hair than strictly necessary. Lyndon Baines Johnson was a piece of work. But all of them read books. When I envision a Trump Presidential Library, I see enormous chandeliers and gold carpet and a thousand slot machines. God help us. I mean it. We’re in trouble down here."

"The word “loser” is spoken with such contempt these days, a man might like to forget the losses in his own life that taught him something about good judgment. The money he invested in that casino in Atlantic City that went bust, the university course he enrolled in that promised to teach him the secrets of success but instead he wound up unemployed and 40 grand in debt, the candidate whose hat he wore who turned out to be tone-deaf and deluded — dumb, dumb, dumb, and yet his loved ones did not chortle and point and do the nyaa-nyaa. They put an arm around him and said, “This is how we learn.” And it is."

"Be well, do good work, and keep in touch."

"In electronic publishing, they're are no editors and if their are there not very good."

"If you can't trust a Methodist with absolute power to arrest people and not have to say why, then whom can you trust?"

"If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it's no longer the United States of America as you and I always understood it. Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them."

"None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Idea."

"Jesus said the meek would inherit the earth, but so far all we've gotten is Minnesota and North Dakota."

"I think the most un-American thing you can say is, “You can't say that.”"

"There is almost no marital problem that can't be helped enormously by taking off your clothes."

"Journalism is a good place for any writer to start — the retailing of fact is always a useful trade and can it help you learn to appreciate the declarative sentence. A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing."

"To the cheater, there is no such thing as honesty, and to Republicans the idea of serving the public good is counterfeit on the face of it — they never felt such an urge, and therefore it must not exist."

"Well, they're taking kids out of the country and sending them over there, National Guard kids and Army Reserve. They're sending kids who are barely prepared for this, and they're sending them over there to kill people, which is a serious thing. And to kill not terrorists, but to kill insurgents. I sort of find myself in agreement, uncomfortably, with Patrick Buchanan, who writes about this in his book, Where The Right Went Wrong. And writes that great powers, the way they skidded off the road, was getting involved in wars. That it's the role of great powers to stay out of wars."

"Lillian Smith is a very great, and heroic, and very lonely figure. Obviously. She has very few friends in that little hamlet in Georgia where she carries on so gallantly. She has paid a tremendous price for trying to do what she thinks is right. And the price is terribly, terribly high. The only way the price can become a little bit less is for more people to do it."

"The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making."

"We in America – and men across the earth – have trapped ourselves with that word equality, which is inapplicable to the genus man. I wish we would forget it. Stop its use in our country: Let the communists have it. It isn’t fit for men who fling thei...r dreams across the skies. It is fit only for a leveling down of mankind."

"Segregation is evil; there is no pattern of life which can dehumanize men as can the way of segregation."

"She stood at the gate, waiting; behind her the swamp, in front of her Colored Town, beyond it, all Maxwell. Tall and slim and white in the dusk, the girl stood there, hands on the picket gate."

"There comes a time in the life of every human when he or she must decide to risk "his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor" on an outcome dubious. Those who fail the challenge are merely overgrown children, can never be anything else."

"Above all, Heinlein taught us to accept his wisdom without becoming followers. He taught us to become, and to remain, individuals. … The Libertarian movement must go far to prove itself, but it may prove to be the one bright spot in an otherwise bleak era. The shadow of two powerful minds cast themselves over everything about that movement, whether we recognize it or not: the minds of Ayn Rand and Robert A. Heinlein. … What Heinlein gave it, no less vital if we’re to effect the changes we aspire to, was heart the guts."

"The people of every nation want to make their country cleaner, stronger, and a better place for the next generation. The quality of patriotism in its finer form is seen in every land around the world. As Robert Heinlein often made clear, it should not be confused with imperialism, which is conceptually its opposite, nor with a refusal to listen to criticism. Patriots listen to and evaluate all criticism; but they make up their own minds. This idea, of thoughtful independence and loyalty to one’s own kind (species, nation, town, and family) runs through the corpus of Heinlein writing."

"Heinlein stories also say that there are in this world (and all others) good guys and bad guys, and the good guys will finally win, and the bad guys, driven by greed or vanity or hate or lust for power, should and will finally lose. This is a moral position, and Heinlein’s works never lack morality (which, as he clearly pointed out, has little or nothing to do with the conventional definition of morals, so often preoccupied as they are with the sexual customs of a particular age)."

"The fourth notion drawn in the works of Heinlein, something which again may seem unpopular today, is the idea that competence is good. There’s nothing wrong with being a polymath. You don’t have to be bad at one thing, you can be good at many things. When you read Heinlein, he doesn’t write about idiots, fumbling their inadequate way through the world to achieve nothing. And why should he? Others are doing that. Too many novels today have as their message: “Let me take you in this book from the squalid, dull, and meaningless life that you live, to the squalid, dull, and meaningless life that I live. Heinlein would have none of that. He believed that there is nothing wrong with being competent."