novelists-from-maryland

"A home is not a museum. It doesn't have to be furnished with Picasso paintings, or Sheraton suites, or Oriental rugs, or Chinese pottery. But it does have to be furnished with things that mean something to you."

"Love, when you get fear in it, it’s not love any more. It’s hate."

"Sit here, now, and look. The water, the surf, the colors on the shore. You think they make the beauty of the tropical sea, aye, lad? They do not. 'Tis the knowledge of what lurks below the surface of it, that awful-looking thing, as you call it, that carries death with every move that it makes. So it is, so it is with all beauty. So it is with Mexico. I hope you never forget it."

"By nine, Mildred was powdered, puffed, perfumed, and patted to that state of semi-transparency that a woman seems to achieve when she is really dressed to go out."

"If you have to do it, you can do it."

"Tomorrow night, if I come back, there’ll be kisses. Lovely ones, Frank. Not drunken kisses. Kisses with dreams in them. Kisses that come from life, not death.""It's a date."

"Under those blue pajamas was a shape to set a man nuts."

"When she tired, I loosened up a little, to let her blow. Yes, it was rape, but only technical, brother, only technical. Above the waist, maybe she was worried about the sacrilegio , but from the waist down she wanted me, bad. There couldn’t be any doubt about that."

"A receptionist is a lazy dame that can’t do anything on earth, and wants to sit out front where everybody can watch her do it."

"The hand that holds the money cracks the whip."

"They threw me off the hay truck about noon."

"She was a little given to rehearsing things in her mind, and having imaginary triumphs over people who had upset her in one way and another."

"... Walter, the time has come.""What do you mean, Phyllis?""For me to meet my bridegroom. The only one I ever loved. One night I'll drop off the stern of the ship. Then, little by little I'll feel his icy fingers creeping into my heart."

"A woman is a funny animal."

"Restaurant, hey. That's what I've got. Whole goddam country lives selling hot dogs to each other."

"I make no conscious effort to be tough, or , or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices, and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this ' of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort."

"I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake."

"There’s a shark. Following the ship."I tried not to look, but couldn’t help it. I saw a flash of dirty white down in the green. We walked back to the deck chairs."Walter, we’ll have to wait. Till the moon comes up.""I guess we better have a moon.""I want to see that fin. That black fin. Cutting the water in the moonlight."

"I understood it now, understood a lot of things I had never understood before. And mostly I understood what a woman could mean to a man. Before, she had been a pair of eyes, and a shape, something to get excited about. Now she seemed something to lean on, and draw something from, that nothing else could give me. I thought of books I had read, about worship of the Earth, and how she was always called Mother, and none of it made much sense, but those big round breasts did, when I put my head on them, and they began to tremble, and I began to tremble."

"He was enthusiastic about everything, but when she came in with the pie he grew positively lyrical."

"We’re just two punks, Frank. God kissed us on the brow that night. He gave us all that two people can ever have. And we just weren’t the kind that could have it. We had all that love, and we just cracked up under it. It’s a big airplane engine, that takes you through the sky, right up to the top of the mountain. But when you put it in a Ford, it just shakes it to pieces. That’s what we are, Frank, a couple of Fords. God is up there laughing at us."

"Stealing a man’s wife, that’s nothing, but stealing his car, that’s larceny."

"Let's get stinko."

"I kissed her. Her eyes were shining up at me like two blue stars. It was like being in church."

"Just you and me and the road."

"We only have two kinds of weather in California, magnificent and unusual."

"I ripped all her clothes off. She twisted and turned, slow, so they would slip out from under her. Then she closed her eyes and lay back on the pillow. Her hair was falling over her shoulders in snaky curls. Her eye was all black, and her breasts weren't drawn up and pointing up at me, but soft, and spread out in two big pink splotches. She looked like the great-grandmother of every whore in the world. The devil got his money's worth that night."

"He might be asleep, but even asleep he looked like he knew more than most guys awake."

"I had killed a man, for money and a woman. I didn’t have the money and I didn’t have the woman."

"That’s all it takes, one drop of fear, to curdle love into hate."

"We're the friendliest enemies that ever were."

"Have you got a little bit of gypsy in you?""Gypsy? I had rings in my ears when I was born."

"The simple burden of my essay ["The Literature of Exhaustion"] was that the forms and modes of art live in human history and are therefore subject to used-upness, at least in the minds of significant numbers of artists in particular times and places: in other words, that artistic conventions are likely to be retired, subverted, transcended, transformed, or even deployed against themselves to generate new and lively work. I would have thought that point unexceptionable. But a great many people … mistook me to mean that literature, at least fiction, is kaput …That is not what I meant at all. … [L]et me say at once and plainly that …literature can never be exhausted, if only because no single literary text can ever be exhausted — its "meaning" residing as it does in its transactions with individual readers over time, space, and language. …What my essay "The Literature of Exhaustion" was really about, so it seems to me now, was the effective "exhaustion" not of language or of literature, but of the aesthetic of high modernism: that admirable, not-to-be-repudiated, but essentially completed "program" of what Hugh Kenner has dubbed "the Pound era." In 1966/67 we scarcely had the term postmodernism in its current literary-critical usage — at least I hadn't heard it yet — but a number of us, in quite different ways and with varying combinations of intuitive response and conscious deliberation, were already well into the working out, not of the next-best thing after modernism, but of the best next thing: what is gropingly now called postmodernist fiction; what I hope might also be thought of one day as a literature of replenishment."

"[T]he vocation of writing seriously involves the continuous and deep examination of one's own experience of life and the world, and of the language and literary conventions we use to register that experience and make it meaningful."

"I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist."

"Consider that if the novelist is like God and a novel like the universe, then the converse ought to have at least some some metaphorical truth: The universe is a novel; God is a novelist! (I have observed elsewhere that the trouble with God is not that He's a bad novelist; only that He's a realistic one, and that dates Him.) [Footnote:] But also keeps bringing Him back into fashion."

"Is a man a salvage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile manners? Or is salvagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?"

"I don't think it's a good idea, as a rule, for artists to explain their art, even if they can. Jorge Luis Borges puts it arrogantly: God shouldn't stoop to theology. A modern painter put it more politely and poetically: Birds have no need of ornithology."

"We tell stories and listen to them because we live stories and live in them."

"More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations."

"[I]t is sometimes pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him."

"'Tis e'er the wont of simple folk to prize the deed and o'erlook the motive, and of learned folk to discount the deed and lay open the soul of the doer."

"[N]othing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it, from outside, by people."

"The night-sea journey may be absurd, but here we swim, will-we nill-we, against the flood, onward and upward, toward a Shore that may not exist and couldn't be reached if it did."

"One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way."

"[T]here is no will-o'-the-wisp so elusive as the cause of any human act."

"'Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion."

"Marilyn Marsh, who had about had it with Spain, declared to him [the old Spanish man]: … But it redounds to your national credit, the then Missus Turner went on in effect — she'd been reading up on reciprocal atrocities in the Guerra Civil — that the sunny Spanish could never be guilty of an Auschwitz, for example. In the first place, your ovens would have died, like our kitchen stove, instead of your Jews, whom you'd got rid of anyhow in the sunny Fifteenth century, no? And in the second place the whole idea of extermination camps would've been too impersonal for your exquisite Moorish tastes. Much more agradable to push folks off a cliff one at a time into a gorgeous Mediterranean sunset, as you did near Malaga — three hundred, was it, or three thousand? Or to rape and then kill a convent-full of nuns in the manner of the saint of their choice — was that Barcelona or Valencia?"

"Women thought me charmingly shy, and sometimes stopped at nothing to “penetrate the disdainful shell of my fear,” as one of their number put it. Often as not, it was they who got penetrated."

"The story of our life is not our life. It is our story."