American Fiction Quotes

“I’ll say, G’day to you, Mr. Ryan!” Catherine said as she quickly closed the door in his face. “Oh, the arrogance,” she growled under her breath, leaning her back up against the closed door. “He thinks he’s so irresistible with his rugged good looks and sexy accent.”

“I’m standing right here, and I can hear you!” came Jake’s muffled words from the other side of the door. “Oh, c’mon love. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I was offending you.”
― Diane Merrill Wigginton, A Compromising Position

“Better to have it and not need it, then need it and not have it. Is that your logic?”
― R. Gerry Fabian, Just Out Of Reach

“Come on, Zeus. Get up. Come on. I know you can do it.”
― R. Gerry Fabian, Just Out Of Reach

“You can’t even read American fiction to get a sense of how actual life is lived these days. You read American fiction to learn about dysfunctional white folk doing things that are weird to normal white folks.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“All of the village was of a piece, a time, and a style; it was as though the people needed the ugliness of the village, and fed on it. The houses and the stores seemed to have been set up in contemptuous haste to provide shelter for the drab and the unpleasant, and the Rochester house and the Blackwood house and even the town hall had been brought here perhaps accidentally from some far lovely country where people lived with grace. Perhaps the fine houses had been captured—perhaps as punishment for the Rochesters and the Blackwoods and their secret bad hearts?—and were held prisoner in the village; perhaps their slow rot was a sign of the ugliness of the villagers.”
― Shirley Jackson

“I used to think old age was a kind of feather bed you gradually sank down into, but it’s not. It’s a goddam stone wall you butt your head into till it cracks.”
― Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King

“You have a notion, like Raynal, of natural liberties, and we all have them by virtue of our being human. But when those liberties are put under societal and cultural pressure, they become civil liberties, and those are contingent on hierarchy and situation. Am I close?"
Voltaire was scribbling on paper. "That was good, that was good. Say all of that again.”
― Percival Everett, James