Novelists From The United States

"Oh, I'm sorry, sir, if I offended you. I am not anti-Semitic. I love all of my brothers and sisters. Jews, Catholics, Buddhists, even the atheists, I love them all. Like you Americans sing, 'Joy to the world and Jeremiah Bullfrog!"

"[Flying into Baltimore after 9/11] I didn't want to see some pacifist, vegan, whole-wheat, free-range, organic, progressive, gray-ponytail, communist, liberal, draft-dodging, NPR-listening wimp! What are they going to do if somebody tries to hijack the plane? Throw a Birkenstock at him? Offer him some pot?...I was hoping for about twenty-five NRA-loving, gun-nut, serial-killing, psychopathic, Ollie North, Norman Schwarzkopf, right-wing, Agent Orange, post-traumatic-stress-disorder, CIA, FBI, automatic-weapon, smart-bomb, laser-sighting bastards!"

"I don't want long hair, I don't want short hair, I don't want hair at all, and I don't want to be a girl or a boy, I want to be a yellow-orange leaf some little kid picks up and pastes in his scrapbook."

"He wondered if she would dream about a man who never left her, about some unemployed agoraphobic Indian warrior who liked to wash dishes."

"He hated to leave, but he loved his work. He was a man, and men needed to work. More sexism! More masculine tunnel vision! More need for gender-sensitivity workshops!"

"Randy Peone: It's a good day to be indigenous!"

"Victor: White people won't respect you if you don't look mean. You have to look like a warrior, like you just got back from killing a buffalo. Thomas: But our tribe never hunted buffalo. We were fishermen. Victor: What, you want to look like you just caught a fish? This isn't Dances with Salmon, you know!"

"Nurse: You guys are like the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Thomas: We're more like Tonto and Tonto."

"Thomas: Sometimes it's a good day to die, and sometimes it's a good day to have breakfast."

"Victor: Get Stoic."

"Thomas: Hey Victor! I'm sorry 'bout your dad. Victor: How'd you hear about it? Thomas: I heard it on the wind. I heard it from the birds. I felt it in the sunlight. And your mom was just in here cryin'."

"My 2017 is gonna be white liberals shocked about white racism & white conservatives denying white racism exists. Just like every other year."

"When a glass sits on a table here, people don't wonder if it's half filled or half empty. They just hope it's good beer."

"It was arrogance…I had the feeling I was going to be successful, and I didn't want to be another disappointing Indian. The mess my father was, it broke my heart. I didn't want to break an Indian kid's heart."

"“…It wasn't just the influence of tribal cultures, it was the assimilation into fundamentalist Christianity, which is even more warrior culture, even more honor culture, and even more suspicious of difference. So I was getting bombarded not only by the more fundamentalist aspects of my tribe, but the more fundamentalist aspects of our assimilation into Christianity. So that was going on all around us, and, in fact, in second grade we had this ex-nun teacher who put us into stress positions as torture.”"

"My father was always depressed. When he was home and sober, he was mostly in his room…You always knew they were coming: he was never violent, but short-tempered. It wasn't a violent house, but a violent reservation."

""I knew — because of my race, and my class, and rural geography ... all these forces that crush all sorts of American kids, crush their hopes and dreams — I knew I had no chance unless I left and went to a better school.”"

"Sherman Alexie's "Distances" directly invokes the Ghost Dance and subsequently mixes a sense of nostalgia with Indian trapdoor humor, suggesting that a bitterly satiric approach is the valid response to the traumatic impact of apocalyptic eschatology on First Nations peoples."

"Despite cycling and recycling the same old tropes told in the same voice, [a Sherman Alexie book] has received not one poor review. Is Alexie really such a flawless writer that critics cannot go beyond praise as repetitive as his oeuvre itself? Or are most reviewers seduced by the charming prose of an Indian who eases their guilty consciences? The latter seems much more likely…For both Vine Deloria and Alexie, humor is about survival. The difference however is that Deloria sees survival in asserting tribal Indian identity, Alexie sees it in chuckling distance.”"

"By my count, there are now over 20 women who are accusing him of harassment"

"The only exception to his careful planning was plot; the best way to stop the reader guessing the end of a story, he decided, was not to know how it ended yourself."

"Though I don't really understand her I love my sister, her name's Miranda The boys from uptown they can't stand her The more she denies them the more they demand her But she just wants to lay in bed all night Reading Raymond Chandler"

"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room."

"They say money don't stink," he said. "I sometimes wonder."

"...crazy as two waltzing mice."

"“Who is this Hemingway person at all?” “A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good.” “That must take a hell of a long time,” the big man said."

"We sneered at each other across the desk for a moment. He sneered better than I did."

"A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window."

"He had a battered face that looked as if it had been hit by everything but the bucket of a dragline. It was scarred, flattened, thickened, checkered, and welted. It was a face that had nothing to fear. Everything had been done to it that anybody could think of."

"Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food."

"On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn't do me any good. All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again."

"What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was. But the old man didn't have to be. He could lie quiet in his canopied bed, with his bloodless hands folded on the sheet, waiting. His heart was a brief, uncertain murmur. His thoughts were as gray as ashes. And in a little while he too, like Rusty Regan, would be sleeping the big sleep."

"I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from.Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights."

"She bent over me again. Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house."

"You know what Canino will do---beat my teeth out and then kick me in the stomach for mumbling."

"You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women. Women made me sick."

"Tsk, tsk," I said, not moving at all. "Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains. You're the second guy I've met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail."

"You're broke, eh?"

"The registration read: Carmen Sternwood, 3765 Alta Brea Crescent, West Hollywood. I went back to my car again and sat and sat. The top dripped on my knees and my stomach burned from the whiskey. No more cars came up the hill. No lights went on in the house before which I was parked. It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in."

"Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead."

"Her hot black eyes looked mad. "I don't see what there is to be cagey about," she snapped. "And I don't like your manners." "I'm not crazy about yours," I said. "I didn't ask to see you. You sent for me. I don't mind your ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don't waste your time trying to cross-examine me.""

"The old man nodded, as if his neck was afraid of the weight of his head."

"A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy."

"A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock."

"The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men."

"Tall, aren't you?" she said. "I didn't mean to be."

"The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying."

"It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars."

"The girl slept on, motionless, in that curled-up looseness achieved by some women and all cats."

"Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn't like it is either crazy or sober."