Alan > Books: Read‎ (1175)

Over the course of twenty-five years, Herbst and his group confirmed, the fairy biomass declined by 76 percent.
—pp.5-6

Over the course of twenty-five years, Herbst and his group confirmed, the fairy biomass declined by 76 percent.
—pp.5-6

The capacity for self-deception was, despite all myths to the contrary, more tenaciously protected in men than in women.
—p.266

"Sometimes I despise this city."
—p.69

"Not everyone is in favor of Arafat. You know Hamas will try to break the talks."
—p.271

Cassie is wayward. Cassie is fey. Cassie is the last girl on earth fit to raise a child. Everyone is agreed.
—p.3

Odd family indeed, starting with Martha and her phantom visitors. Then Aida, the eldest, married to a man who by common consent looked like a walking corpse; and then the spinster twins, Evelyn and Ina, pillars of the spiritualist church, permanently organizing and documenting the visits of mediums, psychics, clairvoyants, rappers, howlers and peepers; Olive, who could cry for everything and Una, who wouldn't squeeze a tear for anything; and Beatie, who would put up her fists to defend the sanctity of an intellectual idea; and Cassie who thought it passing strange that human beings were not equipped with wings to fly.
—p.26

Beatie, who according to Martha was "afflicted with too much brain," was studying at the Workers' Education Association.
—p.16

"We've got to build a land fit not just for heroes but the children of heroes."
—Bernard, p.23

I could easily see the sterility of hopping from bed to bed and having shallow affairs with lots of shallow people. I had had the unutterably dismal experience of waking up in bed with a man I couldn't bear to talk to—and that was certainly no liberation either.
—pp. 73-74

Being unmarried in a man's world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead. Almost anything had to be an improvement on hustling for your own keep at some low-paid job and fighting off unattractive men in your spare time while desperately trying to ferret out the attractive ones. Though I've no doubt that being single is just as lonely for a man, it doesn't have the added extra wallop of being downright dangerous, and it doesn't automatically imply poverty and the unquestioned status of a social pariah.
—p.80

I know some good marriages. Second marriages mostly. Marriages where both people have outgrown the bullshit of me-Tarzan, you-Jane and are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other, doing the chores as they come up and not worrying too much about who does what. Some men reach that delightfully relaxed state of affairs about age forty or after a couple of divorces. Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you're going to die anyway.
—p.81

Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared. In the most paranoid societies (Arab, Orthodox Jewish) the women are kept completely under wraps (or under wigs) and separated from the world as much as possible. They gossip anyway: the original form of consciousness-raising. Men can mock it, but they can't prevent it. Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.
—p.100

Never fuck a psychoanalyst is my advice to all you young things out there.
—p.122

Any system was a straitjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly. I didn't believe in systems. Everything human was imperfect and ultimately absurd. What did I believe in then? In humor. In laughing at systems, at people, at one's self. In laughing even at one's own need to laugh all the time. In seeing life as contradictory, many-sided, various, funny, tragic, and with moments of outrageous beauty.
—p.128

In the months since my first book had appeared, I had received plenty of bizarre phone calls and letters from men who assumed that I did everything I wrote about and did it with everyone, everywhere. Suddenly, I was public property in a small way. It was an odd sensation. In a certain sense, you do write to seduce the world, but then when it happens, you begin to feel like a whore. The disparity between your life and your work turns out to be as great as ever. And the people seduced by your work are usually seduced for all the wrong reasons. Or are they the right reasons? Do all the nuts in the world really have your number? And not just your telephone number either.
—p.139

If you were female and talented, life was a trap no matter which way you turned. Either you drowned in domesticity (and had Walter Mittyish fantasies of escape) or you longed for domesticity in all your art. You could never escape your femaleness. You had conflict written in your very blood.
—p.157

Coupling doesn't always have to do with sex; you see it among friends who live together, or old married homosexuals who rarely even screw each other anymore, and you see it in some marriages. Two people holding each other up like flying buttresses. Two people depending on each other and babying each other and defending each other against the world outside. Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.
—pp.161-162

How am I supposed to understand the nuances of human conversation if everyone is just lying all the time?
—Moku, p.124

Standing over her, Tanai, in a defensive martial stance, fingers glowing.
Across from him, in front of the exit, the Roc, wings out. He holds Tanai's sword, waving it in slow circles.
At the Roc's feet, Antim. He's badly hurt, covered in blood. There's a large open wound on his left side, gushing blood, but somehow, he's smiling.
There's water all over the room, already ankle deep, and more pouring in from the tunnel, a steady stream.
"Get the lamp," Antim says, his voice a gurgle.
The Roc shoots his wing-blades. Tanai force-shields.
Fire burst. Shield. Darts. Shield.
The Roc hurls Tanai's sword...
Tanai catches it.
Cracks spider out all over the chamber from the corridor. A huge crack appears in the chamber's ceiling.
The Roc screams, and picks Antim up, covering him with his wings. He turns, and races out of the chamber, dropping two more eggs as he leaves.
—p.180

"Day after day of wanting to say, 'Okay, stranger, thank you for pointing out my home is trash, I know it is, and it's so much worse than you think, what you're seeing is just the tip of the trashberg, but you know what, you're trash too, and so is your entire bloodline and jokes-forwarding list, and all the places their ancestors came from, so thank you very much for your blinding insight and original observation and casual grope, now please, and I say this with nothing but best wishes, go fuck yourself, and don't forget to leave us a nice rating.'"
—Lina, p.376

"You had the job as soon as you told me why you wanted it."
—p.19

"What the hell are djinn?"
"Spirits, sir. Like fairies, but more litigious. Allegedly."
—p.251

Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere. While others who have something to say or who want to be effectual, like musicians or baseball players or politicians, have to get out there in front of people, writers, who tend to be shy, get to stay home and still be in public. There are many obvious advantages to this. You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away.
—p.xiv, "Introduction"

Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
—p.22, "Shitty First Drafts"

To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass—seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one.
—p.102, "Looking Around"

{...} if you do care deeply about something—if, for instance, you are conservative in the great sense of the word, if you are someone who is trying to conserve the landscape and the natural world—then this belief will keep you going as you struggle to get your work done.
—pp.106-107, "The Moral Point of View"

Or look at the fourteenth Dalai Lama, who is, for my money, the sanest person currently on earth. He says simply, "My true religion is kindness." That is a great moral position—practicing kindness, keeping one's heart open in the presence of suffering. Unfortunately it does not make great literature.
—p.107, "The Moral Point of View"

We are all in danger now and have a new everything to face, and there is no point gathering an audience and demanding its attention unless you have something to say that is important and constructive. My friend Carpenter says we no longer need Chicken Little to tell us the sky is falling, because it already has. The issue now is how to take care of one another.
—p.108, "The Moral Point of View"

Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.
—p.114, "Broccoli"

Of course, it goes without saying that to make lemonade, all you need is a pitcher, a lemon-juice squeezer, ice cubes, water, lemons, and sugar. That's all. Oh, and a long spoon. But my aunt was a little depressed, and this lemonade-making thing must have seemed like something that would be fun and would maybe hydrate her life a little, filling her desiccated spirit with nice, cool, sweet lemonade. The contraption consisted of a glass pitcher, with a lemon squeezer that fit on top and that had a holding tank for the lemon juice. What you did was to fill the pitcher with water and ice cubes and sugar, then put the squeezer—with its holding tank—on top, squeeze a bunch of lemons, then pour the lemon juice from the holding tank into the pitcher. Finally, you got your long spoon and stirred. The lemon googe (I loved that word!—APS) and seeds stayed on top in the juice squeezer. The whole thing was very efficient, but if you thought about it too long, totally stupid, too.
—p.139, "Index Cards"

Lighthouses don't go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.
—p.236, "The Last Class"

{...}that gorgeous plutocracy which has so nobly exalted the necessities of genteel life.
—p.15

A man's mind—what there is of it—has always the advantage of being masculine,—as the smallest birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm,—and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality. Sir James might not have originated this estimate; but a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition.
—p.26

The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.
—p.121

There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.
—p.603

a story-writing process that involves taking the first and last sentences from a well-known work (often a novel, sometimes a short story) and then "re-stuffing" what goes in-between those lines to create a new, wholly-original work.
—p.ix of editor Mark Malamud's Introduction, whichever side you choose

I decided why limit myself to just one story? Why not do them all?
—p.27

was crowned with the Tiptree tiara and given a plaque, a check, a pie, and a ceramic sculpture of a duck.
—p.102

Alana and Tarka had a chat and we worked out the story together. I couldn't have done it without them.
—Story Notes, p.83

He'd breastfed her himself.
—p.89

And the next thing I knew, I was deep in the bowels of a dangerous cult, alone and terrified for my life.
—p.64

He's managing her entire experience, and he probably thinks she appreciates it.
—p.20

"With the internet, we find each other. It's like this amazing alternative world. You don't have to prostrate yourself to the usual conformist rules. You're free to be your weird and wild self. So it's a more honest place, less fraudulent, more real."
"More real than what?"
"The world. The manufactured fishbowl construct we live in. The whole mind-control commercialized oppression apparatus."
"Wow. That must be one hell of a flyer you made."
—pp.16-17

"Liberal, leafy, and loaded."
—p.68

Their bohemian neighborhood had turned into a yuppie neighborhood with a bohemian theme.
—p.86

It was a room on the tenth floor of an office building on Upper Wacker Drive, a high-rise build on the spot where the river split into its north and south branches. The front of the building had been designed in the traditional rectilinear manner—straight lines and right angles where it fit into the downtown grid—but the back of the building was not rectilinear at all. It was, instead, one long and graceful curve that exactly mimicked the curve of the river below it. And the building's blue-green mirrored glass had been selected to exactly mimic the color of the water. It was a building created to perfectly fit into and reflect its particular surroundings, and most everyone agreed that it was one of Chicago's most beautiful and clever buildings, but it was a disaster for the local birds, who literally could not tell the difference between sky and water and glass, and so office life in this building was characterized by the violent frequent whumping sound when a window halted the flight of some unfortunate sparrow or warbler or duck.
—p.193

"{...}maybe we call something 'nothing' to avoid the knowledge that it's been lost."
—p.213

There was, Jack sometimes mused, a kind of church-like quality to the farmers market: a bunch of similarly minded people waking up a little earlier than they'd probably prefer to wake up on a weekend, coming to a place that offered salvation from an abstract bad guy—either Satan or late capitalism, depending. The stories were different, but the dominant aesthetic seemed about the same: both the church and the farmers market longed for a more pristine Earth, one as either God or nature originally intended, before humanity came along and fouled it all up.
—p.349

"Back then, we really believed that the worst person in the entire soulless corporate machine was the man in the gray flannel suit, you know? The man in the small beige cubicle. But we were wrong about that. The truth is that tattooed hipsters are way, way worse."
"How do you figure?"
"Because they're capitalism's prospectors, mining the earth for the next trendy thing."
—p.351

Do cellphone towers really cause cancer?
Are jet contrails really poisonous?
{...}
Is the fluoride the government puts into the drinking water actually making the population so foggy-headed and dumb and passive that we don't notice all of these obvious plots and lies?

And the answer to all of these questions turns out to be, probably: yes.
—p.453

How could they not understand that he had never felt like one of them? For so many years, they had treated him like a reject, and now here they were, telling him the worst thing he could do was reject them back.
So he made it pretty clear to the people back home that he was going to Chicago to absolutely forget where he came from.
—p.458

"Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility. And don't trust the arrogance of certainty. I mean, my goodness, Elizabeth, if you want the gods to really laugh at you, then by all means call it your forever home."
—Dr. Otto Sanborne, p.544

Like every other person who had ever been alive in the history of

Like every other person who had ever been alive in the history of the world Harold really wasn't sure if there was a God.
The only thing about this fact that bothered Harold was that he didn't like to belong to groups.
—p.17

"It's a small world... but I wouldn't want to paint it."

Right outside a porch ran the length of the house.
A couple of rocking chairs painted green were casually sitting out there.
Like they were having a quiet meeting and would stop talking when people came near.
—p.48

Harold thought how weird and strange it must be to be a girl.
He was glad he wasn't one because he didn't think he would be able to do that.
Or he wouldn't want to do that.
It's probably good that you are who you are and that's it.
You don't get to be both then choose after testing them out.
This was in the 1960s not like many many years later when it would become like going through a sexual identity salad bar.
—pp.21-22

Because he was aware, even at his age, that if she knew how much he really liked her she would be in charge and his life would be ruined.
—p.60

I was thinking about how short life is and then I drank coffee.
—p.209

"The Spirit Medicine solves all difficulties."
—p.170

"Business. Government. How are they different? I trust neither of them," Princess Mwadi replied.
—p.113

"Sixty isn't the end of the world, you know," the Poet objected.
—p.148

"We fell like feathers, light and pretty, blown softly to the ground by the last mild wind before the approaching storm. At first, like feathers, we knew nothing of where we were—empty sand and shadows kept us apart. Then, just as we found ourselves together again, the first fury struck: blasts of sand like the blows of a giant fist. Where was there shelter?"
—p.348

Yoga was a terrible idea.
—p.171

And why is it that men sometimes sit bolt upright in the middle of the night, bathed in sweat, terrified by some nightmare, but that they never sit bolt upright at work, in the much more horrifying nightmare they live every day?
—pp.64-65

Except for cats, that is. Indeed, the cat is the only thing on Earth that really interests me. Probably because it doesn't seem to belong to this world. What is the source of that indolence it alone possesses, that insolent laziness that seems to thumb its nose at commerce, that ability to live life at such a languid pace amid a frantic world of fits and starts, that pleasure it gets from curling up into a ball, complacent in its apathy, opening an eye from time to time to look out on the madness of the world around it, a world that couldn't possibly concern it? Who knows? Men have often asked themselves the same questions. Strange to think that they tolerate cats. No doubt because they don't understand them. They only understand dogs, their devoted brethren, always craving affection, always ready to perform a thousand clever tricks. In any case, cats are truly the only things on this planet with which I feel some affinity.
—pp.72-73

Soon, nobody would remember what the twentieth century once called "public services."
—p.152

Life is monotonous in the celestial city. Sadly, I'm apparently the only one who notices.
—p.203

"It's better to avoid dying when we're sick," explained the doctor. "The organism requires longer to recover."
—p.263