Top 42 American Contemporary Fiction Quotes
#1. A tightrope walker uncertain if he could make it to the other side probably would not. A race car driver wondering if he was taking a turn too fast was likely to lose control. If a man feared death, whether his own or the taking of another's, death would surely come calling.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#2. If only women are talking about women's rights, then the issue has failed from the start. If you think about the Holocaust, that wasn't just a Jewish issue. Civil rights weren't just a black issue.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#3. American Morons is the work of an original. Like Hitchcock or Ramsey Campbell, the style is precise, alert, and well-mannered, inviting us to enter Hirshberg's private world so that he may lock the door behind us. If there is anyone in contemporary fiction worth watching, it is Glen Hirshberg.
Dennis Etchison
#4. He now realized that right and wrong were intertwined notions. His arms could not differentiate between just and unjust causes. They only knew that they were empty.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#5. Nothing felt better to him than the act of waiting for her. As long as he believed it wasn't in vain, he was able to justify his presence.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#6. There's the theory that nudity doesn't really make something sexy; the characters and their relationship make it sexy.
Tim Robbins
#7. ...forever meant different things to people at different times. They could imagine what infinity looked and felt like as much as they wanted, but could never truly grasp its meaning nor bear its full weight.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#8. When he spoke of love, it was in the manner of someone who can recite a phrase in a foreign language but has no idea what it means. He only knows that it sounds pretty.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#9. The money is of no concern to me, whatsoever. I started out with nothing.
Dwayne Johnson
#10. The suffering we bring on ourselves, we can ask to be taken away from us once we repent of it. The suffering sent to instruct us, we can ask for the strength to endure, and the humbleness to be instructed.
John C. Wright
#12. Is freedom a lateral component, or a vertical one?
Rick Bass
#13. Spending $100 million on a fancy gym is completely unremarkable in contemporary American higher education. Yet $10 million for a really good online biology course that could serve millions of students is seen as an outlandish, unaffordable expense.
Kevin Carey
#14. Maybe it's about opening up your definition of family to include friends, too. Because friends are the family you choose.
Kim Holden
#15. I love contemporary North American fiction and short fiction. My favorite writer is Jonathan Franzen, and my favorite writers of short fiction are George Saunders and Alice Munro.
Emily Perkins
#16. The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.
Will Self
#17. It was almost as if she had willed him into existence, into standing before her at the precise moment she was willing to accommodate him, arriving not a minute too early or too late.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#18. The most underrated of all contemporary American writers of fiction.
William March
#19. You have to believe in yourself.
Sun Tzu
#20. Tell me you like it, Olivia. Say the words. Tell me I'm the only one who can set your body on fire like this.
T.K. Leigh
#21. We all have scars. Just because mine are hidden doesn't make them any less painful.
Nicki Salcedo
#22. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.
[Q&A with Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2]
David Foster Wallace
#23. Instead of celebrating my birth, my parents and their whole church mourned. "If God is a God of love," they wondered, "why would He let something like this happen?" MY
Nick Vujicic
#24. It needs but one foe to breed a war, and those who have not swords can still die upon them.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#25. It's an odd situation: I could not write about someone for whom I felt no affection or admiration.
Claire Tomalin
#26. Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#27. He could not love passively; once he loved, he immediately also began to help. And
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#28. His fierce appreciation of female beauty, the unrelenting desire he felt for their company, the pleasure he both derived and sought to give, had led him in and out of quite a few bedroom doors.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#29. And although he recognized that tenderness was not the same as passion, and certainly not equivalent to love, for now it seemed to him a suitable substitute.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#30. There were many tomorrows to be lived through his children. He could only hope that they would face them more courageously than he had, that his mistakes would serve as warning signs rather than crutches to lean on.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#31. On occasion we stumble upon what seems to be a truth. Compared to the surrounding blackness, it sparkles and dazzles our eyes. But are these actually truths? Are our eyes really feasting upon light? Or just patches of grey?
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#32. Though Marcus' essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame.
Jess Row
#34. Yeah, we'll play that. You want fries with that?
Eddie Vedder
#35. [Humans'] capacity to intervene, to compare, to judge, to decide, to choose, to desist makes them capable of acts of greatness, of dignity, and, at the same time, of the unthinkable in terms of indignity.
Paulo Freire
#36. It was his experience that life worked under the same guidelines as a capitalistic society. In order to get what you wanted, it was usually necessary to give up something in return. Sometimes gaining what you defined as everything meant losing what you most needed.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#37. Contemporary American fiction has become cheap counseling to the bereaved bourgeois.
Anis Shivani
#38. Time had taught him that whether his sins were pardoned or left unforgiven, they would remain committed. Tomorrow he would hopefully choose wiser, with a stronger measure of compassion.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#39. My mother clutches at the collar of my shirt. I rub her back and feel her tears on my neck. It's been decades since our bodies have been this close. It's an odd sensation, like a torn ligament knitting itself back, lumpy and imperfect, usable as long as we know not to push it too hard.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#40. Was love ever easy for anyone? If less complicated, would this make it less appreciated? Perhaps love was difficult for good reason. Perhaps everything on God's green earth was the result of a flawless plan, even that which seemed most muddled.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#41. What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.
Dan Quayle
#42. Her library filled her bookshelves and then overflowed into waist-high stacks of books everywhere, piled haphazardly against the walls. If just one of them moved ... the domino effect could engulf the three of us in an asphyxiating mass of literature.
John Green
