Novelists From The United States

"Why was it everything was always so goddam complicated? Even the simplest things was so goddam complicated when you come to doing them."

""A deathbed promise is the most sacred one there is," she hawked at him from the lungs that were almost, but not quite, filled up yet, "and I want you to make me this promise on my deathbed: Promise me you wont never hurt nobody unless its absolute a must, unless you jist have to do it." "I promise you," he vowed to her, still waiting for the angels to appear. "Are you afraid?" he said. "Give me your hand on it, boy. It is a deathbed promise, and you'll never break it." "Yes maam," he said, giving her his hand, drawing it back quickly, afraid to touch the death he saw in her, unable to find anything beautiful or edifying or spiritually uplifting in this return to God. He watched a while longer for signs of immortality. No angels came, however, there was no earthquake, no cataclysm, and it was not until he had thought it over often this first death that he had had a part in that he discovered the single uplifting thing about it, that being the fact that in this last great period of fear her thought had been upon his future, rather than her own. He wondered often after that about his own death, how it would come, how it would feel, what it would be like to know that this breath, now, was the last one. It was hard to accept that he, who was the hub of this known universe, would cease to exist, but it was an inevitability and he did not shun it. He only hoped that he would meet it with the same magnificent indifference with which she who had been his mother met it. Because it was there, he felt, that the immortality he had not seen was hidden."

"Unofficially, nobody really minded the clap. It was a joke to those who had never had it and to those who had been over it for a while. No worse than a bad cold, they said. Apparently the only time it was not a joke was when you had it. And instead of hurting your unofficial reputation it boosted you a notch, it was like getting a wound stripe. They said that in Nicaragua they used to give out Purple Hearts. But officially it hurt your Service Record, and it automatically lost you your rating. On your papers it put a stigma on you. When he put in to get back in the Bugle Corps, he found that while he was away they had suddenly gone over-strength. He went back on straight duty for the rest of his enlistment."

"Somewhere along the line, he thought, these things have become your heritage. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them, without denying with them the purpose of your own existence. Yet now, he told himself, you are denying them, by renouncing the place that they have given you."

"When he finished packing, he walked out on to the third-floor porch of the barracks brushing the dust from his hands, a very neat and deceptively slim young man in the summer khakis that were still early morning fresh."

"Colour makes a difference. Gender makes a difference. Ethnicity makes a difference. Acting as if they don't will create more problems than it will solve."

"I want to make everybody in the world groan with the inevitability of sorrow."

"It will say just about everything I have ever had to say, or will ever have to say, on the human condition of war and what it means to us, as against what we claim it means to us."

"I write to reach eternity."

"This place is hell. They herd you around like cattle; they order you around like dogs; they work you like horses; and they feed you like hogs."

"The sunshine of thine eyes, (O still celestial beam!) Whatever it touches it fills With the life of its lambent gleam. The sunshine of thine eyes, Oh, let it fall on me! Though I be but a mote of the air, I could turn to gold for thee."

"One of the shrewdest observers of our times, Tom Wolfe, used to be fond of employing the French term nostalgie de la boue, coined in 1855 by the French dramatist Émile Augier. It translates as “nostalgia for the mud.” Or what Merriam-Webster now defines as “attraction to what is crude, depraved, or degrading.”"

"Images of cars and highways fill our literature, songs, movies and art, not just in America but worldwide. Books like "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac or "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe were among the first to romanticize driving and road trips. Old blues and early rock songs like "Route 66," "Brand New Cadillac," and "Goin' Mobile" further romanticized cars and highways for the postwar "Baby Boom" generation. Thousands of films and T.V. shows have focused on or predominantly featured cars and car chases: "Rebel Without a Cause," "American Graffiti," "Easy Rider," "Bullet," "The Dukes of Hazzard," the "James Bond" films, and at least half a dozen Burt Reynolds movies. The list goes on... All this pop culture, combined with relentless commercial advertising, has made cars an integral part of our personal identity. We have been taught to equate motor vehicles with wealth, power, romance, rebellion and freedom. Now, everywhere I go in the world, I see cars-millions and millions of cars-in Rome, Guatemala City, Kuala Lumpur, Bombay and Beijing. Everywhere there are huge traffic jams and poor air quality. The number of motor vehicles in the world is growing three times faster than the population."

"At certain points, reading [A Man in Full] can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred pound woman. Once she gets on top, it's over. Fall in love, or be asphyxiated. So you read and you grab and you even find delight in some of these mounds of material. Yet all the while you resist — how you resist! — letting three hundred pounds take you over."

"Interviewer: You didn't read The Right Stuff."

"The Internet is the modern form of knitting. In the old days women who had nothing to do would knit, but at least you got something out of it — a pair of socks, maybe a scarf, occasionally a little bedspread. That’s mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time. But unfortunately you are dealing with words that can have meaning."

"Interviewer: So you weren't surprised by the Dan Rather debacle?"

"Hoyt began moving his lips as if he were trying to suck the ice cream off the top of a cone without using his teeth. She tried to make her lips move in sync with his. The next thing she knew, Hoyt had put his hand sort of under her thigh and hoisted her leg up over his thigh. What was she to do? Was this the point she should say, “Stop!”? No, she shouldn’t put it that way. It would be much cooler to say, “No, Hoyt,” in an even voice, the way you would talk to a dog that insists on begging at the table."

"Among other things Jonestown was an example of a definition well known to sociologists of religion: a cult is a religion with no political power."

"A sect, incidentally, is a religion with no political power."

"He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe."

"Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: "You're either on the bus … or off the bus.""

"Suddenly he is like a ping-pong ball in a flood of sensory stimuli, heart beating, blood coursing, breath suspiring, teeth grating, hand moving over the percale sheet over those thousands of minute warfy woofings like a brush fire, sun glow and the highlight on a stainless-steel rod, quite a little movie you have going on in that highlight there, Hondo, Technicolors, pick each one out like fishing for neon gumballs with a steam shovel in the Funtime Arcade, a ping-pong ball in a flood of sensory stimuli, all quite ordinary, but... revealing themselves for the first time and happening... Now... as if for the first time he has entered a moment in his life and known exactly what is happening to his senses now, at this moment, and with each new discovery it is as if he has entered into all of it himself, is one with it, the movie white desert of the ceiling becomes something rich, personal, his, beautiful beyond description, like an orgasm behind the eyeballs, and his A-rabs — A-rabs behind the eyelids, eyelid movies, room for them and a lot more in the five billion thoughts per second stroboscope synapses — his A-rab heroes, fine Daily Double horsehair mustaches wrapped about the Orbicularis Oris of their mouths — Face! The doctor comes back in and, marvelous, poor tight cone ass, doc, Kesey can now see into him."

"He talks in a soft voice with a country accent, almost a pure country accent, only crackling and rasping and cheese-grated over the two-foot hookup, talking about — "—there's been no creativity," he is saying, "and I think my value has been to help create the next step. I don't think there will be any movement off the drug scene until there is something else to move to —" — all in a plain country accent about something — well, to be frank, I didn't know what in the hell it was all about. Sometimes he spoke cryptically, in aphorisms. I told him I had heard he didn't intend to do any more writing. Why? I said. "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph," he said. He talked about something called the Acid Test and forms of expression in which there would be no separation between himself and the audience. It would be all one experience, with all the senses opened wide, words, music, lights, sounds, touch — lightning."

"The demolition derby is, pure and simple, a form of gladiatorial combat for our times."

"...Las Vegas is the only town in the world whose skyline is made up neither of buildings, like New York, nor of trees, like Wilbraham, Massachusetts, but signs."

"At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping, Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property."

"The room’s changes- water bugs adhering to walls, one bobbing dead mouse- only heightened what hadn’t changed"

"Cecilia’s party had never been cleaned up. The paper tablecloth, spotted with mice droppings… A brownish scum of punch… sprinkled with flies… A profusion of withered balloons hung from the ceiling… The domino game still called for a three or a seven."

"The blue slate roof… visibly darkened. The yellow bricks turned brown… There were other signs of creeping desolation. The illuminated doorbell went out. The bird feeder fell in the back yard and was left on the ground… Mrs Higbie insisted that Mr Lisbon, using a long pole, had closed the outside shutters."

"We asked Father Moody whether he had discussed Cecilia’s death or the girls’ grief, but he said he hadn’t."

"It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together."

"“Obviously, Doctor… you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.""

"We had never known them. They had brought us here to find that out."

"They knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all."

"“None of my daughters lacked for any love. We had plenty of love in our house.”"

"We realized that our fathers, brothers and uncles had been lying, and that .no one was ever going to love us for our good grades."

"We realised that the version of the world they had rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass, they didn't give a damn about lawns."

"The girls were right in choosing to love Trip, because he was the only boy who could keep his mouth shut."

"A series of dissolves, their house, street, city, country, and finally planet, which not only dwarfs but obliterates them."

"“I knew I had to close that window or else she’d go on jumping out of it forever.”"

"The small statue of a girl… donated in memory of Laura White, her bronze skirt just beginning to oxidize. Scars crossed her welded wrists, symbolically, but the Lisbon girls didn’t notice."

"Everybody had a story as to why she tried to kill herself. Mrs. Buell said the parents were to blame. "That girl didn't want to die," she told us. "She just wanted out of that house." Mrs. Scheer added, "she wanted out of that decorating scheme.""

"“We’ll have fun without you”"

"The flagpole that had flown at half-mast the day Cecilia died, though it had been summer and no one but the lawn crew had noticed"

"So much has been written about the girls in the newspapers, so much has been said over back-yard fences, or related over the years in psychiatrists’ offices, that we are certain only of the insufficiency of explanations."

"Vince Fusilli held up his lighter… It was the best we could do for an eternal flame."

"You don’t understand me… I’m a teenager. I’ve got problems!"

"Scanned by the eyes of this intelligence, your path will be without pits to swallow, or snares to entangle you. Environed by the arms of this protection, all artifices will be frustration, and all malice repelled."

"Bloodshed is the trade, and horror is the element of this man."