Novelists From The United States

"You try very hard to make up for something that was never your fault. [...] You didn't choose this kind of life, and yet you have to work so hard to be good." "I don't know that I'm making up for anything," he disagreed lightly. "Like everything in life, I just had to decide what to do with what I was given."

"Dazed and disoriented, I looked up from the bright red blood pulsing out of my arm — into the fevered eyes of the six suddenly ravenous vampires."

"Twilight, again. Another ending. No matter how perfect the day is, it always has to end."

""I love you," I whispered. "You are my life now," he answered simply."

"For almost ninety years I've walked among my kind, and yours … all the time thinking I was complete in myself, not realizing what I was seeking. And not finding anything, because you weren't alive yet."

"If I could dream at all, it would be about you. And I'm not ashamed of it."

"And so the lion fell in love with the lamb..." he murmured. I looked away, hiding my eyes as I thrilled to the word. "What a stupid lamb," I sighed. "What a sick, masochistic lion."

"Our relationship couldn’t continue to balance, as it did, on the point of a knife. We would fall off one edge or the other, depending entirely on his decision, or his instincts. My decision was made, made before I’d ever consciously chosen, and I was committed to seeing it through. Because there was nothing more terrifying to me, more excruciating, than the thought of turning away from him. It was an impossibility."

"It's twilight," Edward murmured. [...] "It's the safest time of day for us," he said, answering the unspoken question in my eyes. "The easiest time. But also the saddest, in a way … the end of another day, the return of the night. Darkness is so predictable, don't you think?" He smiled wistfully. "I like the night. Without the dark, we'd never see the stars."

"It was beautiful, of course; I couldn't deny that. Everything was green: the trees, their trunks covered with moss, their branches hanging with a canopy of it, the ground covered with ferns. Even the air filtered down greenly through the leaves. It was too green — an alien planet."

"About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was part of him — and I didn't know how potent that part might be — that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him."

"It seeks but will not be sought. It finds but will not be found. It holds the one who would touch, Who would cut away pain and ill. But its blade cuts two ways and will not be turned. If you value your well-being, Impede not its way. Treat the toucher doubly well, For he bears the weight Of the balance that must be struck."

""It's a strange world," I murmured, more to myself than to the other native soul. "The strangest," he agreed."

"I held you in my hand, Wanderer. And you were so beautiful."

""You. Are. Not. Leaving. Me." His eyes blazed — burning brighter than I had ever seen them, blue flames."

"What was it that made this human love so much more desirable to me than the love of my own kind? Was it because it was exclusive and capricious? The souls offered love and acceptance to all. Did I crave a greater challenge? This love was tricky; it had no hard-and-fast rules — it might be given for free, as with Jamie, or earned through time and hard work, as with Ian, or completely and heartbreakingly unattainable, as with Jared. Or was it simply better somehow? Because these humans could hate with so much fury, was the other end of the spectrum that they could love with more heart and zeal and fire?"

"It's not the face, but the expressions on it. It's not the voice, but what you say. It's not how you look in that body, but the things you do with it. You are beautiful.""

"You stupid jackass," Ian said. "Who's got the crush on a worm, bro? You gonna call me stupid?"

"That's just great," someone said under his breath. "We've got a bloody queen mother alien living with us. She could blow into a million new buggers at any moment."

"I am female," I complained. "That 'it' business is really getting on my nerves." [...] "By whose definition?" "How about by yours? In my species, I am the one that bears young. Is that not female enough for you?"

"I was all alone in my head — exactly what I had once wanted. It made me feel lost."

"And it wasn't just ripping, but twisting and pulling in different directions. Because Melanie's heart broke, too, and it was a separate sensation, as if we'd grown another organ to compensate for our twin awarenesses. A double heart for a double mind. Twice the pain."

"We have not approached the time when we may speak to each other, but in the mornings sometimes I have heard, echoing far off, the sound of a trumpet. It is apparent that nations cannot exist for us. They are the playthings of children, such toys as children break from boredom and weariness. The branch of a tree is my country. My freedom sleeps in a mulberry bush. My country is in the shivering legs of a little lost dog."

"Writers in the twenties reacted not only to the shock of the First World War but to the values held dear in the nineteenth century. The stock responses of good will and progressive enlightenment as an explanation of human behavior had failed Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson even before the First World War. The new attitudes were expressed not only in the realm of ideas but were implicit in the texture of the work, its language, its style, even in what came to be tagged "lack of style.""

"Sometimes I think we Americans are the loneliest people in the world. To be sure, we hunger for the power of affection, the self-acceptance that gives life. It is the oldest and strongest hunger in the world. But hungering is not enough."

"We got up at four in the morning, that first day in the east. On the evening before we had climbed off a freight train at the edge of town, and with the true instinct of Kentucky boys had found our way across town and to the race track and the stables at once. Then we knew we were all right."

"The young man's mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams. One looking at him would not have thought him particularly sharp. With the recollection of little things occupying his mind he closed his eyes and leaned back in the car seat. He stayed that way for a long time and when he aroused himself and again looked out of the car window the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood."

"Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night," he had said. "You must not try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses."

"You will have to know life," she declared, and her voice trembled with earnestness. She took hold of George Willard’s shoulders and turned him about so that she could look into his eyes. A passer-by might have thought them about to embrace. "If you are to become a writer you’ll have to stop fooling with words," she explained. "It would be better to give up the notion of writing until you are better prepared. Now it’s time to be living. I don’t want to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say."

"Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified."

"On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy's hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples."

"In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful."

"The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, whereas in the artist's imaginative life there is purpose. There is determination to give the tale, the song, the painting, form — to make it true and real to the theme, not to life. Often the better the job is done, the greater the confusion. I myself remember with what a shock I heard people say that one of my own books Winesburg, Ohio was an exact picture of Ohio village life. The book was written in a crowded tenement district of Chicago.The hint for almost every character was taken from my fellow-lodgers in a large rooming house, many of whom had never lived in a village. The confusion arises out of the fact that others besides practicing artists have imaginations. But most people are afraid to trust their imaginations and the artist is not. Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art — although it may possibly be very good journalism? Which is but another way of saying that all of the so-called great realists were not realists at all and never intended being. Madame Bovary did not exist in fact. She existed in the imaginative life of Flaubert and he managed to make her exist also in the imaginative life of his readers."

"Bubble, bubble, flows the stream Like an old tune through a dream."

"She throws a kiss, and bids me run In whispers sweet as roses’ breath; I know I can not win the race, And at the end, I know, is death."

"When Spring is old, and dewy winds Blow from the south, with odors sweet, I see my love, in shadowy groves, Speed down dark aisles on shining feet."

"…somehow it was as if I was being told about something wonderful, something beautiful just waiting for me. All I had to do was wait long enough."

"Didn’t she know how sick to my stomach it made me feel to know it’s possible to end your life with only a baboon to talk to?"

"He was the ugliest, most vicious-looking baboon I’ve ever seen in my life. I mean a real baboon. And there’s the pigman, the smiling pigman, leaning all the way over the guardrail, tossing peanuts to this mean baboon."

"PETA doesn't want stressed animals to be cruelly crowded into sheds, ankle-deep in their own crap, because they don't want any animals to die-ever-and basically think chickens should, in time, gain the right to vote. I don't want animals stressed or crowded or treated cruelly or inhumanely because that makes them probably less delicious."

"Good food and good eating are about risk. Every once in a while an oyster, for instance, will make you sick to your stomach. Does this mean you should stop eating oysters? No way. The more exotic the food, the more adventurous the serious eater, the higher the likelihood of later discomfort. I’m not going to deny myself the pleasures of morcilla sausage, or sashimi, or even ropa vieja at the local Cuban joint just because sometimes I feel bad a few hours after I’ve eaten them."

"Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screwtop jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don't deserve to eat garlic."

"Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It's healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I've worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. Oh, I'll accommodate them, I'll rummage around for something to feed them, for a 'vegetarian plate', if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine. (p. 70)."

"You know what causes w:Chinese restaurant syndrome? Racism. ‘Ooh I have a headache; it must have been the Chinese guy.’"

"Life is complicated. It's filled with nuance. It's unsatisfying. If I believe in anything, it is doubt."

"Anyone who refuses to let you eat your burger at a temperature less than medium is on the side of the terrorists."

"You know what’s great about New York? The threshold for citizenship as a New Yorker is actually pretty short. If you come to New York and you still like it two years after you arrived here, and you still think it’s great and you’re having a good time and you haven’t been just totally ground down and go limping back to wherever the fuck you came from, you know what? You’re in!"

"It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that's enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go."

"The room smelled like a gust of wind from Satan's anus."

"Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself."