American Novels

"Remember to stop as often as necessary to re-connect your energy. Stay full, stay in a state of love. Remember that once you achieve this state of love, nothing nor anyone can pull more energy from you than you can replace. In fact, the energy flowing out of you creates a current that pulls energy into you at the same rate. You can never run out. But you must stay conscious of this process in order for it to work. This is especially important when you interact with people."

"As you know, the scriptural notion of tithing is interpreted most commonly as an injunction to give ten percent of one’s income to a church. The idea behind this is that whatever we give will be returned many times. But the Ninth Insight explains that giving is really a universal principle of support, not just for churches, but for everyone. When we give, we receive in return because of the way energy interacts in the universe. Remember, when we project energy into someone this creates a void in ourselves which, if we are connected, fills up again. Money works exactly the same way. The Ninth Insight says that once we begin to give constantly, we will always have more coming in than we could possibly give away. p. 144"

"Most of the people I talk with haven't even heard of the Manuscript. They come up here and are entranced by the energy. That alone makes them re-think their lives...They seem to find me. p. 84"

"Haven't you ever been around someone who makes you feel guilty when you're in their presence, even though you know there is no reason to feel this way?... it's because you have entered the drama world of a poor me. p.81"

"Cardinal Sebastian... Apparently... is using his influence with the government to increase the military pressure against the Manuscript. He has always preferred to work quietly through the government rather than force a division within the church. Now he is intensifying his efforts... Except for the few priests of the Northern Council and a few others like Julia and Wil, no one else seems to have copies any longer... the scientists at Viciente... the government has closed it down. All the scientists were arrested and their research data was confiscated... that research wasn't accepted by most scientists anyway. The government is apparently selling the idea that these people were breaking the law... they're keeping it very quiet, the government is intensifying its crackdown."

"Leaning back against a tree, I cleared my mind and spent several minutes looking around. The morning was bright and breezy and I watched the wind as it whipped the branches above my head. The air felt refreshing as I took in several deep breaths. p. 76"

"The role of love has been misunderstood for a long time. Love is not something we should do to be good or to make the world a better place out of some abstract moral responsibility, or because we should give up our hedonism. Connecting with energy feels like excitement, then euphoria, and then love. Finding enough energy to maintain that state of love certainly helps the world, but it most directly helps us. p.75"

"The Eighth Insight... is about using energy in a new way when relating to people in general, but it begins at the beginning, with children... We should view them as they really are, as end points in evolution that lead us forward. But in order to learn to evolve they need our energy on a constant basis, unconditionally."

"How can you remain so calm? What if they come crashing in here and arrest all of us? They gazed at me patiently, then Father Sanchez spoke. Don't confuse calmness with carelessness. Our peaceful countenance is a measure of how well we are connected with the energy. We stay connected because it is the best thing for us to do, regardless of the circumstances. You understand that, don't you?"

"After personal energy is increased in this way, you become more sensitive to energy in all things ... and then you learn to take this energy into yourself without eating. Everything around us... has energy. But each has its own special kind. That is why some places increase energy more than others. It depends on how your shape fits with the energy there. p. 71"

"Food is the first way of gaining energy... But in order to totally absorb energy in food, the food must be appreciated... Taste is the doorway. You must appreciate taste. This is the reason for prayer before eating. It is not just about being thankful, it is to make eating a holy experience, so the energy from the food can enter your body... deliberate appreciation of food was the real purpose behind the normal religious custom of being thankful, with the result being a higher energy absorption of the food."

"I felt light and secure and connected.. Like the whole landscape was part of me... Love... I guess I felt a love for everything... You do not make yourself love... You allow love to enter you. But to do this you must position your mind by remembering what it felt like and try to feel it again. p. 72"

"While most of society's recent ills, can be traced to this restlessness and searching, this problem is temporary, and will come to an end."

"We're all looking for more fulfillment in our lives, and we won't put up with anything that seems to bring us down. This restless searching is what's behind the 'me first' attitude that has characterized recent decades, and it's affecting everyone, from Wall Street to street gangs... And when it comes to relationships, we're so demanding that we're making them near impossible."

"We're finally becoming conscious of what we're actually looking for, of what this other, more fulfilling experience really is. When we grasp it fully, we'll have attained the First Insight...."

"When you appreciate the beauty and uniqueness of things... you receive energy. When you get to a level where you feel love, then you can send the energy back just by willing it so. p. 73"

"Staying connected... will be easier once you get clear on who you are."

"We are experiencing these mysterious coincidences, and even though we don't understand them yet, we know they are real. We are sensing again, as in childhood, that there is another side of life that we have yet to discover, some other process operating behind the scenes. p. 8"

"More people every day are convinced that this mysterious movement is real and that it means something, that something else is going on beneath everyday life. This awareness is the First Insight... a reconsideration of the inherent mystery that surrounds our individual lives on this planet. p.8"

"The Manuscript predicts that... human beings will begin to grasp these insights sequentially, one insight then another, as we move from where we are now to a completely spiritual culture on Earth. p. 31"

"We're discovering something new about human life on this planet, about what our existence means, and according to the priest, this knowledge will alter human culture dramatically. p. 6"

"He wouldn't reveal his name but he agreed to answer all my questions... He said the Manuscript dates back to about 600 B.C. It predicts a massive transformation in human society... It's not religious in nature, but it is spiritual."

"They feel destined, as though our lives had been guided by some unexplained force. The experience induces a feeling of mystery and excitement and, as a result, we feel more alive. p. 8"

"The transformation is beginning with the First Insight, and according to the priest, this insight always surfaces unconsciously at first, as a profound sense of restlessness..."

"According to the Manuscript, we're beginning to glimpse an alternative kind of experience... moments in our lives that feel different somehow, more intense and inspiring. But we don't know what this experience is or how to make it last, and when it ends we're left feeling dissatisfied and restless with a life that seems ordinary again."

"How do I start getting clear about myself?"

"The words you have habitually willed through your head in an attempt to logically control events, stop when you give up your control drama. As you fill up with inner energy, other kinds of thoughts enter your mind from a higher part of yourself."

"Coincidences are happening more and more frequently and that, when they do, they strike us as beyond what would be expected by pure chance."

"The First Insight occurs when we become conscious of the coincidences in our lives."

"When we visualize... that each breath pulls energy into us and fills us like a balloon, we actually become more energized and feel much lighter and more buoyant. After I breath in the energy,... I check to see if I have the right emotion... love is not an intellectual concept or a moral imperative or anything else. It is a background emotion that exists when one is connected to the energy available in the universe, which, of course, is the energy of God."

"Evolve! Evolve! Listen to yourself, Father, you have always fought against the influence of evolution. What has happened to you?"

"‘You must of been readin' about that couple in the paper, their car caught fire.’ / ‘What happened to them?’ Her breath felt cut off. [...] / ‘They were trapped, that's all.’ / ‘Oh.’ With relief. Things that happened out of town never seemed to have happened to real people somehow."

"For the reception desks regarded ambulance chasing as some sort of felony or other and Zygmunt himself, at certain moments, wasn't altogether too sure it might not turn out to be denounced as such on Judgment Day. Therefore he played it safe by hustling both sides of the street, the churches as well as the hospitals, and had more novenas to his credit than defrauded cripples. He kept the ledger balanced slightly in Heaven's favor."

"The analyst at the people's clinic was young, pure in heart, and dressed in theories as spotless as his own chaste white jacket."

"Frankie sat on the curb [...] wondering how to get the booze off his breath in a hurry. / ‘You kids got a stick of gum?’ he whispered to two ten-year-old girls studying him placidly, both of them chewing like twin calves side by side. One came up with a single dirty stick, its wrapper long unpeeled, and offered it just out of Frankie's reach. / ‘Joosy Froot. Only cost you a nickel.’ Her accomplice nodded approvingly. ‘That stuff is pretty hard to get these days, mister.’ / Frankie found a lone dime and when the girl had it safely in her hand she advised him further, in lieu of a nickel change, ‘You don't have to worry about that stupid bull, mister. He's as stiff as you are.’ / ‘He can fwisk you but he can't search you,’ the other told him softly, with the softest lisp possible. ‘Don't let him search you without a wawwant.’"

"In twenty seconds the abandoned Ashland Avenue midnight was thronging with sprouts who should have been in bed for hours and windows began blazing with light as if everyone had been sitting around in the dark just waiting for an accident to happen and here they came, lurching with age and skipping with youth, the lame, the sick and the lazy, the fearful, the cheerful and the tamed, [...] all those for whom nothing had yet happened in the world shouting that it had happened at last, they'd always known it would happen sooner or later, that corner had always looked so unlucky. / Something had finally happened outside of the movies."

"[Zygmunt the Prospector] had attended so many night schools in his early manhood that now, in his bustling middle age, he retained the pallor of his Kent College nights: the look of the downtown pavements after the rush-hour window-shoppers are doing all their window-shopping through the bright interiors of dreams. The light on his glasses seemed a reflection of the light of law-school chandeliers in those desperate days when he felt that if he didn't pass the bar he'd be tending one the rest of his life. He looked like a man who had never seen a cloud."

"[...] old Doc Dominoes, as they called him, wasn't Doc Dominowski at all. The original Doc Dominowski had had a license. But after his passing his daughter had rented his office to this blood-reversing impostor who'd left the deceased doc's shingle up. A ruse as simple as that. Though in print he had never claimed to be anything but a wandering masseur. / [...] He boasted that he was the most popular spine manipulator and ray caster on the Northwest Side. He still looked like the business end of a fugitive warrant to Frankie."

"She remembered the years of their courtship like remembering an alien land. [...] Together she and Frankie had carried Easter lamb to Old St. Stephen's for Father Simon's blessing – could it really be so long? How had they both forgotten God so soon? Or had God forgotten them? Certainly God had gone somewhere far away at just the time when she'd needed Him most. Perhaps He too had volunteered and just hadn't gotten His discharge yet. Perhaps He had been a full colonel and still felt the need of keeping His distance. If He had been only a private, then He must have re-enlisted. Or else the world had gone wrong all by itself."

"‘Man, I wasn't hooked, I was crucified. The monkey got so big he was carryin' me. 'Cause the way it starts is like this, students: you let the habit feed you first 'n one mornin' you wake up 'n you're feedin' the habit. / [...] Then I got forty grains 'n went up to the room 'n went from monkey to nothin' in twenny-eight days 'n that's nine-ten years ago 'n the monkey's dead.’ / ‘The monkey's never dead, Fixer,’ Frankie told him knowingly."

"‘I never run for streetcars,’ he'd had the brassbound nerve to tell her the year she was seventeen, after standing her up for half an hour in front of the Pulaski. ‘What's the use? There's always another big red rollin' along right behind. Just like you dames – soon as a guy misses with one all he has to do is look back over his shoulder 'n here comes another down the block pullin' up for a fast pickup.’ / ‘I just won't stand for that kind of talk,’ she'd told him flatly, stamping with rage. ‘I want you to be where you're supposed to be when you're supposed to be 'n dressed like you're goin' to the Aragon, not to shoot six-no-count pool by Wieczorek – that's what I want.’ / ‘There's people in hell want ice water too,’ he'd grinned at her."

"Frankie moaned like an animal that cannot understand its own pain. His shirt had soaked through and the pain had frozen so deep in his bones nothing could make him warm again. / ‘Hit me, Fixer. Hit me.’ / A sievelike smile drained through Louie's teeth. This was his hour and this hour didn't come every day. [...] He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-colored walls of [an addict]'s terrible pit."

"The clock in the room above the Safari told only Junkie Time. For every hour here was Old Junkie's Hour and the walls were the color of all old junkies' dreams: the hue of diluted morphine in the moment before the needle draws the suffering blood. / Walls that went up and up like walls in a troubled dream. Walls like water where no legend could be written and no hand grasp metal or wood."

"‘Man, their eyes when that big drive hits 'n goes tinglin' down to the toes. They retch, they sweat, they itch – then the big drive hits 'n here they come out of it cryin' like a baby 'r laughin' like a loon. Sure I like to watch. Sure I like to see it hit. Heroin got the drive awright – but there's not a tingle to a ton – you got to get M to get that tingle-tingle.’"

"If only he would have hit her so that they would have been able to make it all up in bed later. ‘If Jesus Christ treated me like you do I'd drive in the nails myself,’ she told him in her mind as, in a passion of frustration, she watched him dealing, eternally dealing."

"For those nearest our hearts are the ones most likely to tread upon them. What she could not gain through love she sought to possess by mockery. He was too dear to her: into everything he did she must read some secret hatred of herself."

"Again it had been all his fault, she realized: even the dog on the landing below began yapping up at him. And on top of everything else calling her dirty names – nothing could make up for a man calling his wife dirty names any more than broken china could be mended to look like new."

"The sign above the cash register of the Tug & Maul Bar indicated Antek the Owner's general attitude toward West : I'VE BEEN PUNCHED, KICKED, SCREWED, DEFRAUDED, KNOCKED DOWN, HELD UP, HELD DOWN, LIED ABOUT, CHEATED, DECEIVED, CONNED, LAUGHED AT, INSULTED, HIT ON THE HEAD AND MARRIED. SO GO AHEAD AND ASK FOR CREDIT I DON'T MIND SAYING NO."

"She looked at them both then, with such seeming trust, that something of pity stirred beneath the white-starched hospital jackets. For they saw a child's face, puffed by some muted suffering she could never tell. The face she had rouged, from the nurse's compact, so it was that of a child painted to look like a clown's. / And the eyes so dark and buttoned so tightly. So pinched by that private, midnight-colored grief."

"‘I've had trouble with my eyes lately,’ Vi would hint till Sophie would ask why she didn't get glasses. / ‘It's not that kind of trouble. It's from flirtin', that kind of trouble. Me 'n my bedroom eyes.’ / That was Violet's idea of high humor and Sophie's idea of nothing at all."