novelists-from-the-united-states

"To be a god First I must be a god-maker: We are what we create."

"Hadn't he been blowing kisses to Earth millions of years before I was born?"

"Up in the heights of the evening skies I see my City of Cities float In sunset’s golden and crimson dyes: I look, and a great joy clutches my throat! Plateau of roofs by canyons crossed: windows by thousands fire-unfurled— O gazing, how the heart is lost in the Deepest City of the World!"

"Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses."

"The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; The wise grows it under his feet."

"They can only set free men free... And there is no need of that: Free men set themselves free."

"Man's the bad child of the universe."

"Quick as a hummingbird is my love, Dipping into the hearts of flowers—She darts so eagerly, swiftly, sweetly, Dipping into the flowers of my heart..."

"We age inevitably: The old joys fade and are gone: And at last comes equanimity and the flame burning clear."

"Would you end war? Create great Peace."

"Imaro exploded. "Why do men fight like starving lions over yellow metal and let valuable cattle go?""

"In the dry places, men begin to dream. Where the rivers run sand, there is something in man that begins to flow. West of the 98th Meridian—where it sometimes rains and it sometimes doesn't—towns, like weeds, spring up when it rains, dry up when it stops. But in a dry climate the husk of the plant remains. The stranger might find, as if preserved in amber, something of the green life that was once lived there, and the ghosts of men who have gone on to a better place. The withered towns are empty, but not uninhabited. Faces sometimes peer out from the broken windows, or whisper from the sagging balconies, as if this place—now that it is dead—had come to life. As if empty it is forever occupied."

"The totality of human endeavor is nothing when set against the stars."

"“You’re an atheist,” I said. “No, I believe in God. I believe God exists. I had an experience, I had that vision, and in the vision I saw God. God is a pestilent light ringed with black stars. I’m still a man of faith because I believe, but when I think of God, I think of something like a parasite.”"

"Lambs are sacrificed but rats survive."

"You have to be rich to live forever."

"There was no center, no reason. Courtney’s death was random, banal viciousness inflicted by one organism upon another. There is no design. The universe isn’t kind or cruel. The universe is vast and indifferent to our desires."

"death is where jimi hendrix is, where our revolution ended up."

"the farmer takes Jill down the well & all the king's horses & all the king's men can't put that baby together again crooked man crooked man pumpkin eater childhood stealer."

"There has always been something wrong wif the tesses. The tesses paint a picture of me wif no brain. The tesses paint a picture of me an' my muver—my whole family, we more than dumb, we invisible."

""I'm tired," I says. She says, "I know you are, but you can't stop now Precious, you gotta push." And I do."

"Like their personal lives, women's history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others."

"[Power is] the ability not to have to please."

"Sex cannot be contained within a definition of physical pleasure, it cannot be understood as merely itself for it has stood for too long as a symbol of profound connection between human beings."

"King David and King Solomon Led merry, merry lives, With many, many lady friends, And many, many wives; But when old age crept over them— With many, many qualms, King Solomon wrote the Proverbs And King David wrote the Psalms."

"When all is said and all is done, When all is lost or all is won— In spite of musty theory, Of purblind faith and vain conceit, Of barren creed and sophistry; In spite of all—success, defeat— The judge applies to worst and best, Impartially, this final test:What hast thou done with brawn and brain, To help the world to lose or gain An onward step? Canst reckon one Unselfish, brave or noble deed That thou—nor counting cost—hast done To help a brother's crying need? Not what professed nor what believed— But what good thing hast thou achieved!"

"In this nadir of poetic repute, when the only verse that most people read from one year's end to the next is what appears on greeting cards, it is well for us to stop and consider our poets...It is ourselves that we are hurting by our stupidity and ignorance of poetry, much more than the poets. Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization. But our sodden and lumpish society prefers to lie unleavened and unchanged by the ferment of poetry."

"I can remember...the surprise of animals, not only the pretty mare...but animals in and out, cats and dogs and a milk goat and chickens and guinea hens, all taken for granted, as if man was intended to live on terms of friendly intercourse with the rest of creation instead of huddling in isolation on the fourteenth floor of an apartment house in a city where animals occurred behind bars in the zoo."

"Philosophically, incest asks a fundamental question of our shifting mores: not simply what is normal and what is deviant, but whether such a thing as deviance exists at all in human relationships if they seem satisfactory to those who share them."

"I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life, but I am not one of them. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be. It's wonderful to have someone like that around, you always feel you can count on them. You can go away and come back, you can change your mind and your hairdo and your politics, and when you get through doing all these upsetting things, you look around and there they are, just the way they were, just being."

"If there's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, there is nothing more ubiquitously pervasive than an idea whose time won't go."

"The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it."

"I am not sure how many "sins" I would recognize in the world. Some would surely be defused by changed circumstances. But I can imagine none that is more irredeemably siinful than the betrayal, the exploitation, of the young by those who should care for them."

"Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections?"

"By a peculiar logical inversion the Anglo-Saxon ruling class, its imitators, accomplices, and victims, have come to believe in a Negro problem....While there is actually no Negro problem, there is definitely a Caucasian problem.Continual reference to a Negro problem assumes that some profound difficulty has been or is being created for the human race by the so-called Negroes. This is typical ruling class arrogance, and...has no basis in fact It has been centuries since any Negro nation has menaced the rest of humanity. The last of the Moors withdrew from Europe in 1492.The so-called Negroes...have passed few if any Jim Crow laws...set up few white ghettoes, earned on no discriminatory practices against whites, and have not devoted centuries of propaganda to prove the superiority of blacks over whites....While we may dismiss the concept of a Negro problem as a valuable dividend-paying fiction, it is clear that the Caucasian problem is painfully real and practically universal. Stated briefly, the problem confronting the colored peoples of the world is how to live in freedom, peace, and security without being invaded, subjugated, expropriated, exploited, persecuted, and humiliated by Caucasians justifying their actions by the myth of white racial superiority.The term Negro itself is as fictitious as the theory of white racial superiority on which Anglo-Saxon civilization is based, but it is nevertheless one of the most effective smear devices developed since the Crusades...Of course "white" and "Caucasian” are equally barren of scientific meaning....There are actually no white people except albinos who are a very pale pink in color..."

"Physically the Low Country retains its glamorous air under the scourings and sweepings of industrial change. 'Down on the salt,' as they say, the sea-islands still offer their long, palmetto-fringed beaches and their wide green marshes to the enormous sky. A little way inland the dense woods hung with grey Spanish moss, the nostalgic ruins of plantation houses destroyed by war or fire, the cypress pools of clear black water in which the herons stand like fabulous white blooms on their stalks — these trappings of the Gothic romances have their old power to stir the imagination."

"Augustus sat hunched on the sofa, strangely shrunken; even the Charvet dressing gown had an air of ruin."

"Alabama is more than one of the States. It is another country. The Congo is not more different from Massachusetts or Kansas or California. Alabama is a land with a spell on it — not a good spell always. It is as often "conjured" as enchanted."

"When people discuss religion, it is a pity that they often become excited and argue. We should merely listen, as one does on a dark night; we should merely gaze at the stars."

"Musk can probably build a giant AI data centre on the Moon. But if it can’t compete with much cheaper alternatives on Earth, it could prove a financial disaster that collapses his credibility, and with it his entire corporate empire"

"And who is any of us, that without starvation he can go through the kingdoms of starvation?"

"The most frightening pages of history are those which reveal how easily conditions making a desert of the human spirit may come into existence, with the oozings away of incentive and kindliness in our natural social structure."

"When an actor loses control of himself he loses control of his audience."

"Our forefathers were pioneers. So are we."

"I am no theologian. I am a layman. I am among those who are preached to, and who listen. It is not for me to preach. I should not willingly forego being a listener, a man who reads the Gospels and then listens to what others say that our Lord meant. But sometimes a listener speaks out, and listens to his own voice."

"Each of us is a being in himself and a being in society, each of us needs to understand himself and understand others, take care of others and be taken care of himself."

"Of course they put communist propaganda in the movies! They paint a rich man as a fiend. They make every rich man in a play look like a fat boy in a museum, and every poor boy is made out as a skeleton. Actually, the only millionaires I've ever known were skinny dyspeptics—look at Rockefeller."

"Woman's intuition is the result of millions of years of not thinking."

"It is very unlikely that we would drive to extinction any native Martian microorganisms in the process of extending the habitability of Mars."

"The censors are going to stop crime by censoring the films. Why don't they put an end to diseases by burning the medical books which describe them?"