novelists-from-massachusetts

"For all practical purposes, wheat is civilization. It produces what we euphemistically call the staff of life, a staff which has recently been behaving like a boomerang...By the same token, wheat makes politics and has always made them. Whether you turn to ancient Rome, Egypt or Mesopotamia, or advert to modern times, you will find wheat working political earthquakes. Wheat, needed by England, won the Civil War for the North; then the American transcontinental lines opened the wheat empire of North America, and our wheat wrecked agriculture in Central Europe. Austria-Hungary took to growing hogs, instead, and agricultural experts swiftly decided that Serbian swine were unsanitary, laid down an embargo and started a political avalanche that led straight to Serajevo."

"Marge: It's about a boy who goes to war. His hand is deformed in an accident. Bart: Deformed? Why didn't you say so? They should call this book Johnny Deformed."

"He had never in all his life slept in a bed alone — much less a whole room."

"Most American heroes of the Revolutionary period are by now two men, the actual man and the romantic image. Some are even three men—the actual man, the image, and the debunked remains."

"We give all we have, lives, property, safety, skills ... we fight, we die, for a simple thing. Only that a man can stand up."

"How old are you, Johnny?" she asked. "Sixteen." "And what's that — a boy or a man?" He laughed. "A boy in time of peace and a man in time of war."

"After that Johnny began to watch himself. For the first time he learned to think before he spoke."

"Human relations never seem to stand completely still. This apple, for instance. It might ripen into something better than it now was, or, unromantically, it might rot away in his pocket."

"On rocky islands gulls woke."

"Hundreds would die, but not the thing they died for. A man can stand up."

"I knew he could learn — if he didn't get killed first. It was sink or swim for him — and happens he's swimming."

"Just like the sun coming up yonder out of the sea, pushing rays of light ahead of it."

"A man can stand up to anything with a good weapon in his hands. Without it, he's but a dumb beast."

"Then Johnny saw running down Cambridge road through the bushes on Charlestown Common a scurry of red ants. ... Those red ants were British soldiers. ... You could see the flash of musket fire, too far away to be heard. Fireflies swarming, hardly more than that."

"If he still were in England and were the man whom this girl loved, she would probably seek him out — women have almost a genius for anticlimaxes."

"Bart [burning books]: So long, Johnny Tremain. Your Newberry award won't save you now!"

"The very basis of true peace of mind is a benevolent wish to see all the world as happy as one's Self; and from my soul do I pity the selfish churl, who, remembering the little bickerings of anger, envy, and fifty other disagreeables to which frail mortality is subject, would wish to revenge the affront which pride whispers him he has received."

"Pleasure is a vain illusion; she draws you on to a thousand follies, errors, and I may say vices, and then leaves you to deplore your thoughtless credulity."

"... my boys, with only moderate incomes, when placed in the church, at the bar, or in the field, may exert their talents, make themselves friends, and raise their fortunes on the basis of merit."

"... she had on a blue bonnet, and with a pair of lovely eyes of the same color, has contrived to make me feel devilish odd about the heart."

"Can you, who have always been used to serenity and order in a family, to rational, refined, and improving conversation, relinquish them, and launch into the whirlpool of frivolity, where the correct taste and the delicate sensibility which you possess must constantly be wounded by the frothy and illiberal sallies of licentious wit?"

"The mind of youth eagerly catches at promised pleasure: pure and innocent by nature, it thinks not of the dangers lurking beneath those pleasures, till too late to avoid them."

"It is by surmounting difficulties, not by sinking under them, that we discover our fortitude. True courage consists not in flying from the storms of life; but in braving and steering through them with prudence. Avoid solitude. It is the bane of a disordered mind; though of great utility to a healthy one."

"... the heart that is truly virtuous is ever inclined to pity and forgive the errors of its fellow creatures."

"He is a gay man, my dear, to say no more; and such are the companions we wish when we join a party avowedly formed for pleasure."

"Wealth and titles, which were sure to be heaped on the hero or heroine of the tale at last, she considered as the ultimatum of all sublunary good."

"Oh my dear girls, for to such only am I writing, listen not to the voice of love, unless sanctioned by paternal approbation; be assured it is now past the days of romance."

"The mind, after being confined at home for a while, sends the imagination abroad in quest of new treasures; and the body may as well accompany it."

"You ask me, my friend, whether I am in pursuit of truth, or a lady? I answer, both. I hope and trust they are united; and really expect to find truth and the virtues and graces besides in a fair form."

"... while discretion points out the impropriety of my conduct, inclination urges me on to ruin."

"Of all the pleasures of which the human mind is sensible, there is none equal to that which warms and expands the bosom, when listening to commendations bestowed on us by a beloved object, and are conscious of having deserved them."

"An unusual sensation possesses my breast — a sensation which I once thought could never pervade it on any occasion whatever. It is pleasure, pleasure, my dear Lucy, on leaving my paternal roof."

"I had never identified as a lesbian; I liked how the word "queer" signalled transgressive desire without gendering me. I hung out with lots of queer men, and found something closer to my reflection in gay male culture, probably because I could identify with the combination of queerness and masculinity more than with lesbian culture (though I was primarily dating lesbians)."

"... we're in a rapidly unfolding global emergency. Why are we talking about this? You know what a pressing feminist issue is? Global climate change. Seriously, excluding trans women from spaces should not be near the agenda. It's obscene."

"It’s hard for me to understand when people are calling some of these trans exclusionary people, "radical feminists" – I really always bristle at that. I don't think they're either radical or feminists. It's a real misnomer from my perspective."

"I love the word queer, because what's useful about it is that it has the potential to be radically inclusive. I hope it signals an interest in, if not radical political thought, at least a destabilising. Destabilising binary ideas of gender and sex. I really struggled with this feeling of not being trans enough, I don’t feel like any of the words really work. I like words that leave things a little unclear. The main thing for me is if you respect people self-determination, and if somebody says they're queer, or they're trans, they are, and it’s not that big of a deal. And I will also say that having been in adult queer life for a number of decades now, most of the time, people who have some vested interest in saying they're queer or trans, there’s a good reason for it."

"Finding a word that fits right is not my biggest concern, but I think it's a valuable thing and non-binary is useful. For me I say 'trans-ish'. Transmasculine works for me, if trans is a real umbrella term. I've got a number of friends my age or older who have a similar gender situation, who are using they/them pronouns or have switched recently. I'm just really grateful to young people for making that a viable thing. Pronouns have not been a place where I've put my energy and yet I've benefited from other people's energy."

"Coolness is a big problem in queer life, always being attracted to the shiny thing and not always necessarily being kind."

"My kid's still pretty young, but my partner and I feel strongly about trying to make as much room as possible for liberation in terms of gender and socialisation, so that our kid doesn’t have to essentially have their spirit crushed at this early age. I think there's all these ways in which little kids get boxed in. Maybe it's a gift of being in a queer family, that you get a little more space to just be a person or a creature for longer. And it's all going to come in, we're not bigger than socialisation, we know it. But trying to make that space feels like a part of parenting"

"Sex is a part of life. I think pleasure's really important. I feel that our queer and trans cultural heritage is to prioritise pleasure and self-fulfilment, self-knowledge and art and humour – those seem like really good things to me."

"I tried outlining, tried to understand three-act structure, tried to impose a plot, but kept coming back to my sense that I just needed to follow Paul, that my structure was going to have to be a little queer as well ... I realised my reluctance had to do with my understanding of how people change, how I've changed – really slowly, recursively, making the same mistakes over and over."

"I like pleasure! I mean, I'm queer because I find it fun to be queer, not because it makes me feel virtuous to be queer, not because I was "born this way." I don't care at all about why I'm queer; I feel very lucky to have this life, and that's it. Of course, many of us have struggled mightily, and we also have access to such particular pleasures, so many cultural traditions centred around sex and art and beauty and new ways of doing things. As the Pet Shop Boys said, "we were never being boring.""

"At 18, 19 queer theory felt really glamorous and the place to get answers, and I feel like I understood about 1% of what I was reading. Barthes really spoke to me, Judith Butler's work felt highly important and I'm sure I still don't really understand it and that's become OK with me over the years. Queer theory was just really cool."

"I feel really excited to have found a way to have an adult queer life that feels great and rich, really different from what I thought was possible and also specifically queer. Chosen family, kinship, living arrangements, parenting roles, it all feels like, 'So this is one thing you can do and you can do it in a queer way.' And that's kind of amazing. I feel that every good thing that has happened in my life has come from being queer."

"And then meanwhile, the AIDS crisis is going on. There's a ton of activism, and some of my friends were a little bit older and were already going downtown to Act Up meetings. So I started doing that and that was really how I came into queer life, through that kind of radical organising. That was a really exciting place, because it was people working together across their differences to make change. It was a coalition: lots of different people working together with a shared enemy. It's a model which is obviously super relevant today."

"Already, less than five minutes after being fired, I was on the contagious list. A leper is more welcome than a discharged employee."

"When a man knows what he is talking about, his voice crackles with authority."

"Henry Chatterly’s mouth became a fine, narrow line across the lower half of his face. His eyes glittered hard, in for just one instant that fresh-faced youth, Ivy League appearance vanished. It was like The Picture of Dorian Gray, only instead of a depraved old man I saw a storm trooper."

"Flash turned and looked over his shoulder. I was there, all right, some distance away but close enough for Flash to realize I would always be there, waiting, ready to overtake him the first instant he faltered. He knew it, and I knew it, and we neither of us harbored any ill feeling because of it. It’s the way of the world, the business world."

"What I mean, you can’t just go ahead and foist on the consumer some gimmick that potentially could undermine our entire social and economic system. Simply because the consumer wants it."