Fantasy Authors

"“Was your mother furious?” “She’ll get over it,” Stanton said. “Perhaps not in this lifetime, but I happen to believe in reincarnation, so there’s still hope.”"

"Could one die from boredom, she wondered? From complete, oppressive, crushing, unmitigated boredom, the likes of which made all other boredom seem like ecstasy’s sweet thrilling embrace? And in such a case, if one happened to have a life insurance policy, would it pay?"

"“I’ll do everything I can to help, I promise.” “You always have,” Emily murmured. Except tell me the truth about anything."

"You know, there’s one thing about you that always astonishes me. The longer you talk, the wronger you get."

"She wanted to crawl into his arms and be soothed, and soothe him in return, and forget all the grand ideas she’d ever had about true love, and the necessity for it. Because true love was a load of baloney. Finding a good friend...a good friend who trusted you...was more than enough."

"Emily stared into the middle distance, trying to ignore the fact that the men were looking at her like a cupcake on a plate."

"Sadly, there is a fine line between patriotism and paranoia."

"Senator Stanton? The man who’s sold his own soul so many times that no one can figure out who actually owns it?"

"But it was impossible to remain so long in the company of a female, even a divine one, without suffering some form of disillusionment."

"“I’m sorry Mr. Stanton, really I am. I didn’t mean to miss it. Things...happened.” “Oh, well. Things happened. How nice to have that cleared up.”"

"“They say that they’re a punishment on godly people for allowing sin to walk the earth unanswered—” “Who is this ‘they’ you’re always referring to?” Stanton glared at Rose, his eyes gleaming with unhidden malice. “Your mongoloid Aunt Kindy? Your drunken Uncle Sal? Or are you talking about the slack-jawed hacks who bang out those dime novels for a bottle of whiskey and the price of a flophouse?” Rose stared at him, her mouth open in astonishment. But Stanton pressed on, his voice flat and awful. “Or maybe you’re just using the word ‘they’ as so many pea-brained idiots use it, as a cowardly rhetorical device, an excuse to say the things you really believe without giving anyone the chance to judge you for the narrow-minded, stupid creature you are.”"

"Before the sun went down again, she realized, she would be in New York. The thought sent a nervous thrill through her entire body. Her throat was tight, her heart suddenly racing."

"In New Bethel, we take the word serious. We whip whores, we hang thieves, and we burn sorcerers."

"He’s lying. I have no doubt he’s excellent at it."

"Emily looked at him for a long time. There were so many things she wanted to know—but she wanted not to know them even more. She didn’t want any more answers. He had been the one thing she could trust, the one person she could rely on. She wanted to beg him to be that way again. But it wasn’t him who had changed. It was her. It was her own credulity she really wanted back. And credulity, like virtue, could be lost only once."

"Zombies are soulless creatures, and being soulless has been empirically proven to result in an unpleasant disposition."

"“Still feeling guilty, are we? I’d have thought you’d be over that by now.” “I have a nettlesome little thing called a conscience,” Emily hissed. “Ever hear of it?” “They’re out of fashion in New York,” Stanton said, and though she guessed she was joking, he didn’t sound humorous."

"“Dignity is like morality,” Mirabilis barked. “Too much is as bad as too little.”"

"The obsessive rules of etiquette struck Emily as mean-spirited, like the old trick of tying someone’s shoelaces under the table. It was only fun if you liked watching people fall down."

"The sight of Oakland sprawling on the horizon gave Emily’s spirits an additional boost. Oakland was by no means lovely, but it meant they were almost to San Francisco."

"Emily’s chestnut-colored hair was thick and shiny as silk floss—an extraordinary female endowment. But like most female endowments, it was generally more trouble than it was worth."

"“Ever mind the Rule of Three...Three times what thou givest returns to thee.”"

"I’d ask you to forego the jingoistic claptrap, but it’s terrifyingly obvious you truly believe it."

"The half moon sailed high, sharp-winged shadows skimming across it, and the conical hills and the vine-shrouded trees washed silver-green under the moonlight had the look of a decaying city millennia after a great catastrophe."

"It was easy to see how one could think of the family as a single terrible creature stretching back through time, some genetic flaw or chemical magic binding the spirit to the blood."

"“An attic’s the afterlife of a house,” said Otille, opening the door. “Or so my mother used to say.”"

"The necessary had been accomplished. That’s the way Les Invisibles work. Singular, unquantifiable events. Impossible to treat statistically, to define with theory."

"We uncovered new forces, we took a step along what may be an endless path toward divinity, we redirected the entire thrust of psychoanalytic theory, and, as with all knowledge, we found that deeper and more compelling mysteries yet lay beyond those we had reduced to the security of fact."

"“And then along came Satan’s Eye Itself. Television.” He laughed, as at some fatal irony. “Don’t you hear the evil hum of the word, the knell of Satan? Television! It’s the ruling character of your lives, like the moon must have been for Indians. An oracle, a companion, a signal of the changing seasons. But rather than divine illumination, each night it spews forth Satan’s imagery. Murders, car crashes, mad policemen, perverted strangers! And you lie there decomposing in its flickering, blue-gray light, absorbing His horrid fantasies!”"

"Every object, the old man had said, is but an interpretation of every other object. There is no sure knowledge, only endless process."

"Overwhelmed with disgust, Donnell said, “I could sell you sorry fuckers anything, couldn’t I?” They weren’t sure they had heard correctly; they looked at each other, puzzled, asking what had been said. “I could sell you sorry fuckers anything,” he repeated, “as long as it had a bright package and was wrapped around a chewy nugget of fear. I could be your green-eyed king. But it would bore me to be the salvation of cattle like you. Take my advice, though. Don’t buy the crap that’s slung into your faces by two-bit wart-healers!” He jabbed his cane at Papa Salvatino, who stood open-mouthed in the aisle, a litter of paper cups and fans and Bibles spreading out from his feet. “Find your own answers, your own salvation. If you can’t do that,” said Donnell, “then to Hell with you.”"

"That the official and the criminal are inextricably aligned should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the workings of their government, but nowhere is this juxtaposition so literal and apparent as in Mexico City."

"Doesn’t that sound like God to you? This big stupid, invulnerable thing that resembles us and whose creations are more intelligent than it is? The Bible left out that part, but it would explain a great deal."

"All journeys end in disappointment if for no other reason than that they end."

"Evil required no real genius, only power, lack of conscience, and an inquisitive nature such as I had seen at work in the tea forest. Men were, indeed, made in Its Image…at least writers and criminals were."

"I submit that all psychotherapy is manipulation; that as psychiatrists we do not heal people, but manipulate their neuroses into functional modes."

"The arms dealers were of especial interest to me. They commonly operated on street corners (some nights, in certain quarters, there seemed to be one on almost every corner) and offered a wide selection of handguns and ammo, the odd assault weapon—hardly surprising in a country where you could, I've been told, blow away a cow with a rocket launcher for a fee of two hundred dollars, less if you were prepared to haggle. I saw in them the future of my own country, where death was celebrated with equal enthusiasm, although candy-coated by Technicolor and video games and television news. When the coating finally wore off, as it threatened to do, there we would all be, in Cambodia."

"Manipulate? Yes, I manipulated. And despite the ensuing events, I would do so again, for it is the function of psychiatry to encourage the living to live."

"The outcry surrounding the public disclosure of the project had taken only three months to die, this—thought Jocundra—a telling commentary upon the spongelike capacity of the American consciousness to absorb miracles, digest them along with the ordinary whey provided by the media, and reduce them to half-remembered trivia."

"She’s sad because she’s drinking to be sad because she’s afraid that what she does not feel is actually a feeling. Typical post-modern Manhattan bullshit."

"Travel has always served to inspire me, as it has many writers, as it apparently did my alter ego; yet the farther we proceeded down the Mekong, the more I came to realize that there was a blighted sameness to the world and its various cultures. Strip away their trappings and you found that every tribe was moved by the same passions, and this was true not only in the present but also, I suspected, in ages past. Erase from your mind the images of the kings and exotic courtesans and maniacal monks that people the legends of Southeast Asia, and look to a patch of ground away from the temples and palaces of Angkor Wat—there you will find the average planetary citizen, a child eating the Khmer equivalent of a Happy Meal and longing for the invention of television."

"Depravity always incorporates obsession."

"Doubt concerning their mental well-being creeps in. Is this an instance of healing or a freak scene? Are they two very different people who have connected on a level new to both of them, or are they emotional burnouts who aren’t even talking about the same subject and have misapprehended mild sexual attraction for a moment of truth? Just how much difference is there between those conditions?"

"She went on to dismiss much of postmodernism as having “an overengineered archness” and, except for a few exemplary authors, being a refuge for those writers whose “disregard for traditional narrative (was) an attempt to disguise either their laziness or their inability to master it.”"

"And that in itself was a sufficient reason to hit him, purely for educational purposes: I had, you see, reached the level of drunkenness at which an amoral man such as myself understands his whimsies to be moral imperatives."

"“These movies, they make war seem like a mystical opportunity. Well, man, when I was here it wasn’t quite that way, y’know. It was leeches, fungus, the shits. It was searchin’ in the weeds for your buddy’s arm. It was lookin’ into the snaky eyes of some whore you were bangin’ and feelin’ weird shit crawl along your spine and expectin’ her head to do a Linda Blair three-sixty spin.” I slipped into a chair and leaned closer to Witcover. “It was Mordor, man. Stephen King land. Horror. And now, now I look around at all these movies and monuments and crap, and it makes me wanna fuckin’ puke to see what a noble hell it’s turnin’ out to be!”"

"“You had no right,” I said. “You—” Tuu’s face hardened. “We had no right to mislead you? Please, Mr. Puleo. Between our peoples, deception is a tradition.”"

"Here was a beast for whom there could be no predator. What better definition of God is there than that?"

"The Southern education stuffs you full of incontrovertible proof that the Rebel defeat was a wild and improbable stroke of misfortune, that the unbeatable military genius of the Confederacy was foiled by an alliance of fate and Yankee treachery. If Stonewall hadn’t misplaced his boots, if Jeb hadn’t gone dancing the night before, if the creek didn’t rise. If, if, if. Acceptance of this viewpoint often leads to embarrassment in later life."

"“You must think us fools,” he said, leading me back into the gathering, “to waste ourselves in commemorating an era which never really existed.”"