Novelists From The United States

"You can show a dozen guys murderin’ each other on TV but you can’t ever show two people making love. The naked blade is reckoned to be less obscene than a naked woman."

"You humans are at least aware of that supreme paradox—that free will exists to an extent for the individual, but disappears in the group—although you can’t work with it."

"The prime datum of the Universe is that life survives by eating life, and no other way. The expense of eating is, in great part, the resistance the second life offers to being eaten."

"Tom said what struck him was how little progress churches have made in two hundred years toward convincing people that the unknown is not by definition evil."

"A man should live forever, or die trying."

"She was pretty enough to make a preacher kick a hole in a stained-glass window."

"Just as there are Laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy, so there are in fact Laws of Conservation of Pain and Joy. Neither can ever be created or destroyed. But one can be converted into the other."

"“You know,” he said with a dangerous high note in his voice, “in all the nine years the prayers never stopped rising from that filthy little cell. For the first three years we prayed that someone would depose El Supremo. For approximately the next three years Mary prayed constantly that my faith in God would return. Then, for about a year I prayed to I-don’t-know-who that Mary would live. And after malaria took her, I spent my time praying to anyone who would listen for a chance to kill El Supremo with my own hands.”"

"I mean, progress is something with no pity and no purpose. It just happens. It chews up all you ever knew and spits out things you can’t understand and the only value it seems to have is to make a few people a lot of money. What the hell is the sense of progress anyway?"

"In a culture where pessimism has metastasized like slow carcinoma, that crazy Irishman was backward enough to try to raise hopes, like hothouse flowers. In an era during which even judicious use of alcohol has been increasingly bad-rapped, the man who came to be known as The Mick of Time was backward enough to think that the world can look just that essential tad better when seen through a glass, brightly. (As long as you let someone else drive you home afterward.) Above all, he—and his goofball customers—believed that shared pain is lessened, and shared Joy increased. Now he is gone. Gone back whence he came, and we are all the poorer for it. But I refuse to say that we will not see his like again. Or his love again."

"Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you are no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow."

"“Where on earth are you going?” Zula asked, looking about for him. But she had lost him in the radiant fog. His voice was clear, though. It was the only sound in the world. “I’m not entirely sure,” he admitted. “But I’m done here. I did what I was sent to do.” The golden light grew until it was all she could see, and his voice was heard no more."

"No sky, no neighboring houses, no trees, no mountains. The fog had clamped it all off. It muffled sound too...She and Enoch were existing in a bubble of space maybe a hundred paces across... She wondered if it had been thus for Dodge in the beginning, when he had been alone in Bitworld and the Landform had begun to take shape around him."

"“I understand the speed of light!” Zula blurted. Faces turned toward her, gawped, then turned away. A hundred years ago, someone would have taken her up on the gambit. Now people were too intimidated—or perhaps they assumed she was finally losing it. Except for Enoch. “Explain it,” he urged her. “I’ve always wanted to understand.”"

"Six dawns in a row, a new soul glimmered on a branch of the old tree, only to fade in the strong light of the day...It looked like a star softened by drifting fog and mist... On the seventh morning it seemed to discard all hopes and intentions of ever making light of its own, and darkened and solidified into the form of a black bird."

"Corvallis took to the air and went for a spin on some tempting thermals while the visitors were shown in... He had known them now for forty years and resigned himself to the fact that their appearance did not change over time. He wheeled around them anyway, peering down on them from all angles. “Calling a meeting of the Societas Eruditorum?” C-plus asked. “You’re the only member left.""

"Agreement got by compulsion or trickery is not agreement, but a thing akin to slavery. Free minds are the only company worth having."

"Her free hand came up. Daisy came up with it, the faded plastic petals floating in front of her face but gradually fading from view as she sank."

"“I could not be more confused as to what we are looking at right now,” announced Gloria Waterhouse. She was a philanthropist, connected with her family's foundation, nontechnical, and always the first to stand up and request commonsense explanations when the discourse became too academic. She'd assigned herself that role and she did it well."

"The Utah state legislature had been taken over by Moab truthers who insisted that Moab had been obliterated by nuclear terrorism 12 years ago. From which it followed that anyone claiming to actually live there was a troll, a crisis actor in the pay of, or a sad dupe in thrall to, global conspirators trying to foist a monstrous denial of the truth on decent folk. In recognition of, and indignation over, which they had passed a law ordering the state licensing bureau to stop accepting motor vehicle paperwork from Moab."

"“One of Enoch’s ancestors was, like, the great-great-granddad of fractal geometry,” Julian reported. “In 1791—” “Oh, god, please don’t read the Wikipedia entry,” Enoch said, showing more emotion than when he had been literally crucified. “I have an edit overlay that filters out most of the garbage,” said Julian, mildly offended that Enoch had taken him for the kind of person who would actually take Wikipedia at face value. “But, Julian, I am sitting right next to you and so you don’t have to consult an online source.”"

"They laid in a course for Moab, which ought to have been as simple as laying in a course for any other place. But a little warning did come up on Sophia's UI, letting her know that the existence of Moab was in question. Opinions differed as to whether it had been burned off the surface of the world by a nuclear blast twelve years ago. ... “It’s easy to forget,” Sophia remarked, “that there are millions of people who really don’t believe that Moab still exists. But when you’re here, you see the REMEMBER MOAB stickers all over the place.”"

"None of them said a word until they had parked in the Walmart's lot. “I am gonna buy some flowers,” Sophia said, “to put on the grave. We’re almost there. Within the blast radius of this.” She nodded toward the front of the superstore. “Blast radius?" “It’s only ten miles farther. Any retail base in the actual town will have been obliterated by this. So if we want to buy anything, we have to buy it here.”"

"Having caught Phil's eye, Sophia panned her gaze across the entire scene, asking him to take it all in. Reminding him that this wasn't Princeton. This was Ameristan. Facebooked to the molecular level. “Professor Long,” she muttered, “the Red Card.” It was a reference to...a wallet card for people to keep in front of them during conversations like this one. One side of the card was solid red, with no words or images, and was meant to be displayed outward as a nonverbal signal that you disagreed and that you weren't going to be drawn into a fake argument. The other side, facing the user, was a list of little reminders as to what was really going on: 1. Speech is aggression 2. Every utterance has a winner and a loser 3. Curiosity is feigned 4. Lying is performative 5. Stupidity is power"

"“There’s been all kinds of confusion about the Leviticans. Some kind of imagined link to the Ku Klux Klan.” “Maybe it’s because of the burning crosses,” Phil suggested, deadpan. “Supposedly the KKK burned crosses,” Ted said with a roll of the eyes. “There’s no ‘supposedly’ about it,” Anne-Solenne started in. “What are you even—” But Sophia silenced her with a hand on the arm. There was no point. “If that is even true, it has no connection to our burning crosses, which have a completely different significance,” Ted announced."

"“Ted has normal-people teeth because he is old and grew up before this part of the world got Facebooked. After that, the people with education fled to places like Ames, Des Moines, Iowa City. Which includes dentists. A few mainline churches used to run charity dental clinics where you could get a bad tooth pulled, or whatever, but those are being chased away by these people.”"

"There was no one moment when they definitely crossed over into Ameristan. The closest thing to a formal ceremony was when Tom pulled over onto the gravel shoulder of a two-lane road between cornfields and yanked off the vehicles' license plates—which was evidently held on with magnets... Then the caravan was back on the road. “When in Rome,” Julian said... About an hour out of Des Moines, they did pass by a tiny sign—Sharpie on plywood—bearing what might have been the burning-cross logo of the Levitican Church."

"“Where are you from?” Sophia asked. Larry looked a bit startled. "I’m from here…Great-greats came over from Holland." "You said ‘y’all.’" Larry was confused.... "What was that about?" Anne-Solenne asked. "It’s totally a Southern way of talking. Iowa is a Northern state. Fought on the Union side in the Civil War. Never had slavery…Northerners don’t talk like that, they don’t drawl, they don’t say ‘y’all’...” “Or put the Stars and Bars on their bumpers,” said Julian...and pointed at a Confederate flag sticker on the back of Tom and Kevin's truck. “Point being, it was not like that to my uncle...When he was born, the Civil War was only ninety years in the past—almost within living memory. It would have seemed weird for Northerners to paste the traitors’ flag on their bumper or cop an accent from Alabama. But while he was alive—” “The cultural border shifted north.”"

"The ancestral home of the Forthrasts was situated in the northwestern quadrant of Iowa...now being displayed in miniature, superimposed on a coffee table in an eating club at Princeton University, visible only to Sophia and to the friends she had shared it with: Phil, Julian, and Anne-Solenne. They could see it as long as they were wearing their glasses. They were planning a summer road trip. They had worked it out as far as Des Moines by following interstate highways. Now Sophia was proposing a diagonal transit to Sioux City on two-lane roads. The very idea of it had led to blank stares...until a solution had taken shape in the agile brain of Sophia's boyfriend Phil: “Look. I’m just not going to tell my parents—or anyone—that we are temporarily going off grid.” ... Sophia decided on the spot not to dump Phil for at least another few weeks."

"All of the people in the conspiracy/troll ecosystem had been sucked into the vortex of Moab and begun to devote excruciating levels of attention to the entire cast of characters...performers in all of the fake videos and Corvallis Kawasaki. For he had been identified by name, on national television, by the president of the United States.... So within 24 hours, the citizens of Crazytown had compiled a huge dossier of mostly wrong material on him.... Crazytown was repelled by facts and knowledge, as oil fled from water, but was fascinated by the absence of hard facts, since it provided vacant space in which to construct elaborate edifices of speculation."

"Having spent the whole day sifting through incredibly depressing news reports, [the White House press corps] were bouncing back to a kind of giddy frame of mind brought on by a combination of completely natural and understandable happiness that Moab was fine...and schadenfreude directed at the social media companies that had been chipping away at their industry and their job security for the last couple of decades. Pointed questions were asked about how just unbelievably irresponsible those companies had been today and whether the scorpion-filled pits into which their executives should now be lowered should be a thousand meters deep or two thousand."

"Stand-up peeing in a long flowing garment could lead to various mishaps."

"The Moab hoaxers had inoculated the [Internet] with a ready-made hoax narrative that was obviously ridiculous, and tailor-made to appeal to the vociferous citizens of Crazytown. Right now everyone's uncle Harry—the angry truther at Thanksgiving dinner—was typing as fast as he could with the caps lock key in effect."

"Of crows, people tended to predicate the same traits that they did of Asians.... Crows were commendably intelligent, and forever busy, but you couldn't tell them apart and their motives were inscrutable. But living inside of his own head, Corvus well knew his own motives. There was nothing wrong with those motives and he didn't need to justify them to anyone else."

"In reenactment groups it was customary for each participant to adopt a persona, or, at a bare minimum, a nickname that wouldn't sound too jarringly anachronistic when called out in the heat of action. Corvallis had become Corvus, which was just the Latin word for “crow.” ... At first he'd been mildly uncomfortable with it.... He now saw it through a hybrid of Pacific Northwest aboriginal myths and Roman aviomancy. ... Crows, or ravens (the distinction was unclear), were set apart by their extreme intelligence, memory, and resourcefulness; but no matter how well they embodied those fine traits, no one appreciated them."

"Someone in DC posted a snapshot of a pizza delivery guy on a Pentagon-bound Metro train, toting a stack of pizzas so high he had to use a two-wheeled dolly. Self-proclaimed experts in the comment thread were climbing all over one another to explain that massive pizza deliveries to the Pentagon were an infallible sign that something big was happening."

"“I need you down here,” said his boss. “All hands on deck.” Then he hung up without explanation, leaving Corvallis with the vague feeling that he was missing something. ... The trail of notifications on his phone told the story. They had originated from various people on various social networks, but they had all been triggered by the same event: the surprising obliteration of the town of Moab, Utah, by what was apparently a tactical nuclear weapon."

"The amount of time spent asleep didn't really matter. He had decided that the key to it all — the one thing that determined whether the nap would actually refresh him — was the breaking of the thread of consciousness...Even if he woke up ten seconds later, he would be as refreshed — possibly more so — as if he'd slumbered deeply for an hour."

"In this dream, Dodge was in the small town in Iowa where he had grown up...the grid street pattern of that town was, decades later, the spatial lattice on which virtually all of his dreams were constructed. It was the graph paper on which his mind seemed to need to plot things."

""We’re bankers. That is really all we are. If you’ve been imagining some sort of fabulous conspiracy, you are in for a disappointment. Bankers, you see, don’t actually do very much. We take our percentage. That is all. We subsist on movements of money—across space, across time, and between Strands.”"

"Sportsmanship is for sportsmen."

"To help the reader calibrate the level of weird that's going on, I believe that the building we all know as the Pentagon was called the Trapezoid when it was first built...It only became the Pentagon a few months ago. But when it did, it wasn't only the building itself that changed, but everyone's memories of it as well. So everyone, including me, thinks it has been the Pentagon from the moment its cornerstone (vertexstone? whatever) was laid...It was converted into the Pentagon on Halloween, just about two months ago, when a significant chunk of the United States military-industrial complex was taken over by witches."

"BOG Container Lines Inc. is the survival into modern times of Bunch of Grapes, which is an extremely old presence in the shipping industry. I mean, it's named after a tavern in Boston from the 1600s that was named after a tavern in London that dates back to at least the 1200s...I'm still waiting for some query results to come back so that we can discover their inevitable connection to the Fuggers. I don't even know why I bother."

"USSS 1: I am beginning to get concerned messages from people in the Pentagon wanting to know why Backhoe is incommunicado. DOSECOPS C4: The Pentagon? USSS 1: The Trapezoid. Was my transmission garbled? DOSECOPS C4: Sorry, I was distracted. I thought you said Pentagon. USSS 1: I'm a little foggy myself with all of the weirdness around here and I may have said the wrong thing. I am referring to the [GARBLED]. The very large building across the Potomac River from DC that is the headquarters of the United States military. Does that help clarify matters? DOSECOPS C4: Sure. The Pentagon. USSS 1: That's what I'm saying!"

"Most of them don't actually care who wins because they understand it's just about who sits on the throne, they know the Crusaders aren't here to try to actually harm the city itself. All the potential emperors are assholes, and they're all related to each other, it hardly matters which one wins. So the citizens are literally picnicking and placing bets on who wins the day."

"IF YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE IN A SWORDFIGHT This comes up a lot and I am working on upgrading the relevant wiki pages, but people seem to end up here anyway LOL. My basic advice: DON'T DO IT! It is ridiculously, fantastically dangerous. Modern people are calibrated for a whole different level of danger acceptance."

"In layperson's terms: if it has to be dunked in liquid helium to work, I don't understand it. If it's in a rack with fans blowing on it, that's a different story."

"I tried working from the other direction, getting what information I could about the modern-day organization, and working backwards. But they were discreet to the point of paranoia, running their business through a network of offshore companies registered in places like the Cayman Islands, Jersey, and the Isle of Man. They only allowed the Fugger name to break the surface when it was to their tactical advantage, as when trying to hire employees for of their humanitarian NGOs."

"I began to dig into the history of the Fuggers. This was the third time in the short history of DODO that the name had unexpectedly come up. And even though they were a famous old banking family, this seemed like too many coincidences... Even with the combined resources of Harvard's library system and U.S. intelligence databases, I wasn't able to find much. The medieval part of the story has been common knowledge for centuries...In 1459 the family had produced Jacob, the seventh surviving child in a large brood...who had, to make a long story short, become the richest person in the world... By 1601 the last central authority had been Markus Fugger: a patron of arts, a history buff, a collector of old artifacts, an ancient-languages geek... [1640] Athanasius Fugger was completely absent from the historical record."

"The next station was called simply TRAPEZOID, but I could have guessed as much from the fact that more than half the people getting on and off the train were dressed in military uniforms of one service or another...As the headquarters of the American military and presumed ground zero for any hostile military strike, the Trapezoid had, for me, always been more mythic than real...The terrorists had targeted it on 9/11, and I could see part of the memorial that had been built on the side where the plane had crashed into it."