Novel Trash Quotes

The school board banned one of Maya Angelou's books, so the librarian had to take down her poster. I fished it out of the trash. She must be a great writer if the school board is scared of her.

Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.

Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common with novel-writers, of degrading, by their contemptuous censure, the very performances to the number of which they are themselves adding; joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronised by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another- we are an injured body.

And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained. And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.

It doesn’t do to read too much,’ Widmerpool said. ‘You get to look at life with a false perspective. By all means have some familiarity with the standard authors. I should never raise any objection to that. But it is no good clogging your mind with a lot of trash from modern novels.

The author of the novel probably didn't think about stuff like this. However, it is up to you to decide on what you'll get out of reading the novel. If you only find trash within, then it'll simply end as trash. But if it can impart just a tiny little bit of deeper meaning to you, then that alone will improve this work in your eyes. Again, it is up to you to decide which one it will be. But I'd really like you to choose the option where you get to 'appreciate' your time a little bit better.

What was the proper etiquette for brain-eating? Pinky up? No slurping sounds? A dainty belch at the end?

I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt.

America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash.

Outside I hopped into our vehicle, the taint of vampiric magic clinging to me like greasy smoke. “I feel soiled.” “Like walking into a room after a day of work, falling into bed, and realizing the sheets are covered in cold K-Y jelly,” Raphael said. I just stared at him. “With a funky smell,” he added. My Order conditioning failed me. “Ew.” Raphael grinned. “I‟m not even going to ask if that‟s happened to you.” I started the vehicle. “Has that happened to you?” “Yes.” Ew. “Where?” “In the bouda house. I was really tired and you‟ve seen that place: everything smells like sex . . .” “I don‟t want to know.” I peeled out of the parking lot. "So where are we going?” “To Spider Lynn‟s house. We‟re going to dig through her trash, and if that doesn‟t work, we‟ll do some breaking and entering.” Raphael frowned. “Do you know where she lives?” “Yes. I memorized the addresses of all the Masters of the Dead in the city. I have a lot of time on my hands.” He squinted at me, looking remarkably like a gentleman pirate from my favorite romance novels. “What else do you store in your head?” “This and that. I remember the first thing you ever said to me. You know, when you carried me from the cart into the tub so your mother could fix me.” “I imagine it was something very romantic,” he said. “Something along the lines of „I‟ve got you‟ or „I won‟t let you die.‟ “I was bleeding in the bathtub, trying to realign my bones, and my hyena glands voided from the pain. You said, „Don‟t worry, we have an excellent filtration system.‟” The look on his face was priceless. “That can‟t be the first thing.” “It was.” We drove in silence. “About the K-Y,” Raphael said. “I don‟t want to know!‟ “Once I washed it out of my hair—” “Raphael, why are you doing this?” “I want to make you go "Ew‟ again.” “Why in the world would you want to do that?” “It‟s an irrepressible male impulse. It just has to be done. As I was saying, once I washed it out—” “Raphael!” “No, wait, you‟ll like the next part.

This novel took me rather longer than usual to write, for a number of reasons but one big one being simply that 2017 was a raging trash fire of a year, filled with horrible people trying to do horrible things and often succeeding. It’s harder to bear down creatively when the world is burning.

and if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel–writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding — joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine–hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens — there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel–reader — I seldom look into novels — Do not imagine that I often read novels — It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss — ?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best–chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it.

You were right the first time, Cathy. It was a stupid, silly story. Ridiculous! Only insane people would die for the sake of love. I'll bet you a hundred to one a woman wrote that junky romantic trash!" Just a minute ago I'd despised that author for bringing about such a miserable ending, then there I went, rushing to the defense. "T. M. Ellis could very well have been a man! Though I doubt any woman writer in the nineteenth century had much chance of being published, unless she used her initials, or a man's name. And why is it all men think everything a woman writes is trivial or trashy-or just plain silly drivel? Don't men have romantic notions? Don't men dream of finding the perfect love? And it seems to me, that Raymond was far more mushy-minded than Lily!

Bit by bit, he has pared down his desires to what is now approaching a bare minimum. He has cut out smoking and drinking, he no longer eats in restaurants, he does not own a television, a radio, or a computer. He would like to trade his car in for a bicycle, but he can’t get rid of the car, since the distances he must travel for work are too great. The same applies to the cell phone he carries around in his pocket, which he would dearly love to toss in the garbage, but he needs it for work as well and therefore can’t do without it. The digital camera was an indulgence, perhaps, but given the drear and slog of the endless trash-out rut, he feels it is saving his life. His rent is low, since he lives in a small apartment in a poor neighborhood, and beyond spending money on bedrock necessities, the only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels, British novels, foreign novels in translation, but in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading is an addiction he has no wish to be cured of.

It doesn't feel like teasing when you go out of your way to make me feel like garbage for liking what I like. I already have to defend it enough with my parents, and with my friends. Like, I get it, ha ha, sometimes there are shirtless men on the covers. But what I'll never understand is why people are so quick to trash this one thing that's always been for women first. They won't let us have this one thing that makes us happy. Nope, if you like romance novels, you have zero taste or you're a lonely spinster.

You’ll find, my friend, that in the gutters of this floating world, much of the trash consists of fallen flowers.

Grundy Dopps, a sour-looking little pinch of white trash, waddled out of his trailer that morning somehow knowing it wasn’t going to be his day.

God says we are of worth. Satan tries to convince us wer are mere trash. If he can accomplish that, then we give up. We do no even try to fullfill our God-given ministry to others.

Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans.

Finally, we entered Chetaube County, my imaginary birthplace, where the names of the little winding roads and minuscule mountain communities never failed to inspire me: Yardscrabble, Big Log, Upper, Middle and Lower Pigsty, Chicken Scratch, Cooterville, Felchville, Dust Rag, Dough Bag, Uranus Ridge, Big Bottom, Hooter Holler, Quickskillet, Buck Wallow, Possum Strut ... We always say a picture speaks a thousand words, but isn’t the opposite equally true?

For obvious reasons, the relationship between novelists, the reviewing establishment and critics in general is chronically, and often acutely, edgy. A kind of low-intensity warfare prevails, with outbreaks of savagery. It is partly an ownership issue. Who, other than its creator, is to say what a work of fiction means or is worth? It can take years to write a novel and only a few hours for a critic, or a reviewer rushing for a tight deadline, to trash it.

We would gladly have listened to her (they said) if only she had spoken like a lady. But they are liars and the truth is not in them. Shrill… vituperative… no concern for the future of society… maunderings of antiquated feminism… selfish femlib… needs a good lay… this shapeless book… of course a calm and objective discussion is beyond… twisted, neurotic… some truth buried in a largely hysterical… of very limited interest, I should… another tract for the trash-can… burned her bra and thought that… no characterization, no plot… really important issues are neglected while… hermetically sealed… women's limited experience… another of the screaming sisterhood… a not very appealing aggressiveness… could have been done with wit if the author had… deflowering the pretentious male… a man would have given his right arm to… hardly girlish… a woman's book… another shrill polemic which the… a mere male like myself can hardly… a brilliant but basically confused study of feminine hysteria which… feminine lack of objectivity… this pretense at a novel… trying to shock… the tired tricks of the anti-novelists… how often must a poor critic have to… the usual boring obligatory references to Lesbianism… denial of the profound sexual polarity which… an all too womanly refusal to face facts… pseudo-masculine brusqueness… the ladies'-magazine level… trivial topics like housework and the predictable screams of… those who cuddled up to ball-breaker Kate will… unfortunately sexless in its outlook… drivel… a warped clinical protest against… violently waspish attack… formidable self-pity which erodes any chance of… formless… the inability to accept the female role which… the predictable fury at anatomy displaced to… without the grace and compassion which we have the right to expect… anatomy is destiny… destiny is anatomy… sharp and funny but without real weight or anything beyond a topical… just plain bad… we "dear ladies," whom Russ would do away with, unfortunately just don't feel… ephemeral trash, missiles of the sex war… a female lack of experience which… Q. E. D. Quod erat demonstrandum. It has been proved.

As they sneaked through the corridors, Metal Beard and Benny heard robot guards approaching. They jumped back against a wall and quickly disguised themselves as a photocopier and a trash can. The robots looked at each other when they spotted the photocopier. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” one asked. “Do it!” said the other. The first guard climbed on top of the photocopier and started Xeroxing his tush. Metal Beard immediately un-transformed and blasted the guards with his cannon.

There's a reason why most men don't read romance: Romance novels are wish-fulfillment for women. The fictitious men in romance novels fall all over themselves trying to please a woman. Does that sound like your real life experience with men? No of course not. (Except for guys who want to fuck you. There is no man more attentive as the guy who wants to fuck you for the first time.) That's why you read romance. To get something you don't get in real life. Because your husband's idea of romance is bringing out the trash and not farting during sex.

Does this popcorn taste burnt to you?" Miles asked, chewing loudly. "Don't eat that," Roland said, plucking the popcorn from Miles's palm. "Arriane got it out of the trash after Luce set the dorm room kitchen on fire." Miles began spitting frantically, leaning over the edge of Roland's wings. "It was my way of connecting with Luce." Arriane shrugged. "But here, if you must, have some Milk Duds." "Is it weird that we're watching the two of them like a movie?" Shelby asked. "We should imagine them like a novel, or a poem, or a song. Sometimes I feel oppressed by how reductive the filmic medium is." "Hey. Roland didn't have to fly you out here, Nephilim. So don't act smart, just watch. Look." Arriane clapped. "He's totally staring at her hair. I bet he goes home and sketches it tonight. How cuuute!" "Arriane, you got way too good at being a teenager," Roland said. "How long are we going to watch for? I mean, don't you think they've earned a little privacy?" "He's right," Arriane said. "We have other things on our celestial plates. Like..." Her smirk faded when she couldn't seem to think of anything.

wind whirled the fallen leaves and discarded trash littering the entrance to the old water park. As a young man approached the looming gate, an eerie chill snaked down his spine. “This place is creepy as hell,” he muttered, shining his flashlight on the weathered sign. “You sure you want to do this?” The young woman who had coerced him into coming out here ripped the lid from the plastic bucket she was holding. “Dr. Cooper needs to take notice that the students of Ashmore College are not going to stand for this new research facility of his. You heard how smug he sounded at the protest tonight. He thinks he can get away with anything just because his mother is president of the college. Someone has

The art show at the new branch of the Whitney met Eph’s exceedingly low expectations. One artist made small Lucite cubes filled with garbage purloined right from New York City trash bins. There were cigarette butts and fast-food wrappers and even blobs of moldy food. Eph could hear one nearby aesthete gush about the artist’s “urban truthfulness.” Another artist featured a painting of a rose done entirely in menstrual blood. The flaw, Eph thought, was that blood dried brown, not red, but nobody seemed to be pointing that out. He also wondered what it had to do with the “New Urban.” “There are no words,” said Eph, sotto voce in case the artist was lurking among the people nearby. “Art is meant to provoke,” said D’Arcy. “If you have a reaction, even a negative one, then the artist has succeeded

I survived. Raped children are supposed to die. What would the culture of the individual white cisgender male straight genius do without us? We are the predicate of their sentences, material for their dispassionate dissections. We are supposed to die prettily and vacantly so our rage doesn’t tear down all their certificates and awards and case files, trash their analysis and ram their face in the privilege that allows them to side with our abusers in silencing and killing us. “He has sometimes likened his style of writing to that of a medic performing a post-mortem on a raped child-whose job is to analyze the injuries, not to give vent to the rage that is felt.” - Susie Mackenzie on J.G. Ballard, Guardian, Sept. 6th, 2003 If Ballard’s is the model for the experimental, political novel, how is the (un)dead raped child supposed to write, even if she survives?

from the upcoming novel, Agent White: A figure dressed all in black ran across the rooftops in the rain. A black cloak fluttered behind him as he ran two and sometimes three stories above the sidewalk where Ezra Beckitt stood. Long silver hair tied back in a ponytail flew out behind him, exposing ears that came to sharp points. His left ear was pierced with a silver ring, high up in the cartilage. Like the old man, this black figure wore a sword; but this weapon was long and thin, slightly curved. The blade stuck out behind him for three and a half feet, almost seeming to glow against the grey backdrop of the rain-soaked cityscape. Suddenly, the figure in black looked down into the street and saw Ezra there. More, he saw Ezra seeing him. Startled, he lost his sure footing and slid down the steep incline of an older building’s metal roof, the busy street below waiting to catch him in an asphalt embrace. The figure in black got his feet under himself and pushed, flying out into space above the street. For an eternity Ezra watched him, suspended in the air and the rain with his cloak spread in midnight ripples around him, and then the figure in black flipped neatly and landed on the sidewalk half a block away. The pavement cracked, pushing up in twisted humps around the figure in black’s tall leather boots. Before the sound of this impact even reached Ezra the figure was up and gone, dashing through the morning throngs waiting for buses or headed to the ‘tram station. Ezra saw a girl’s hair blow back in the wind created by his passing, but she never noticed him. A young techie blinked his 20-20’s (Ezra’s own enhanced senses picked up the augmented eyes because of a strange, silvery glow in the pupils) and turned halfway around, almost seeing him. And then the figure in black darted into an alley, gone. Ezra drew his service weapon and ran after, pushing his way through the sidewalk traffic. Turning into the alley he skidded to a stop, stunned; the figure in black was still there. The alley was just wide enough to accommodate Ezra’s shoulders- he couldn’t have held his arms out at his sides. Dumpsters spilled their trash out onto the wet pavement. The alley ended in a fire door, the back exit of a store on the next street over. Even if it was locked, Ezra didn’t think it would pose a real problem for the figure in black. No, he was waiting for him. Ezra advanced with his gun out in front of him, and his eyes locked with the figure in black’s. His were completely black- no pupils, no corneas, only solid black that held no light. The figure in black smiled, exposing teeth that looked very sharp, and laid his hand on the hilt of his sword. He wore leather gloves with the fingers cut off. His fingers were very long and very white. “Don’t even think about it,” Ezra said, clicking the safety off his weapon. “I am a Hatis City Guard, an if you move I will put you down.” This only seemed to amuse the figure in black, whose smiled widened as he drew his sword. Ezra opened fire.

Keynes was a voracious reader. He had what he called ‘one of the best of all gifts – the eye which can pick up the print effortlessly’. If one was to be a good reader, that is to read as easily as one breathed, practice was needed. ‘I read the newspapers because they’re mostly trash,’ he said in 1936. ‘Newspapers are good practice in learning how to skip; and, if he is not to lose his time, every serious reader must have this art.’ Travelling by train from New York to Washington in 1943, Keynes awed his fellow passengers by the speed with which he devoured newspapers and periodicals as well as discussing modern art, the desolate American landscape and the absence of birds compared with English countryside.54 ‘As a general rule,’ Keynes propounded as an undergraduate, ‘I hate books that end badly; I always want the characters to be happy.’ Thirty years later he deplored contemporary novels as ‘heavy-going’, with ‘such misunderstood, mishandled, misshapen, such muddled handling of human hopes’. Self-indulgent regrets, defeatism, railing against fate, gloom about future prospects: all these were anathema to Keynes in literature as in life. The modern classic he recommended in 1936 was Forster’s A Room with a View, which had been published nearly thirty years earlier. He was, however, grateful for the ‘perfect relaxation’ provided by those ‘unpretending, workmanlike, ingenious, abundant, delightful heaven-sent entertainers’, Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace and P. G. Wodehouse. ‘There is a great purity in these writers, a remarkable absence of falsity and fudge, so that they live and move, serene, Olympian and aloof, free from any pretended contact with the realities of life.’ Keynes preferred memoirs as ‘more agreeable and amusing, so much more touching, bringing so much more of the pattern of life, than … the daydreams of a nervous wreck, which is the average modern novel’. He loved good theatre, settling into his seat at the first night of a production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country with a blissful sigh and the words, ‘Ah! this is the loveliest play in all the world.’55 Rather as Keynes was a grabby eater, with table-manners that offended Norton and other Bloomsbury groupers, so he could be impatient to reach the end of books. In the inter-war period publishers used to have a ‘gathering’ of eight or sixteen pages at the back of their volumes to publicize their other books-in-print. He excised these advertisements while reading a book, so that as he turned a page he could always see how far he must go before finishing. A reader, said Keynes, should approach books ‘with all his senses; he should know their touch and their smell. He should learn how to take them in his hands, rustle their pages and reach in a few seconds a first intuitive impression of what they contain. He should … have touched many thousands, at least ten times as many as he reads. He should cast an eye over books as a shepherd over sheep, and judge them with the rapid, searching glance with which a cattle-dealer eyes cattle.’ Keynes in 1927 reproached his fellow countrymen for their low expenditure in bookshops. ‘How many people spend even £10 a year on books? How many spend 1 per cent of their incomes? To buy a book ought to be felt not as an extravagance, but as a good deed, a social duty which blesses him who does it.’ He wished to muster ‘a mighty army … of Bookworms, pledged to spend £10 a year on books, and, in the higher ranks of the Brotherhood, to buy a book a week’. Keynes was a votary of good bookshops, whether their stock was new or second-hand. ‘A bookshop is not like a railway booking-office which one approaches knowing what one wants. One should enter it vaguely, almost in a dream, and allow what is there freely to attract and influence the eye. To walk the rounds of the bookshops, dipping in as curiosity dictates, should be an afternoon’s entertainment.

To achieve the kind of hard beat ’Gasm needed to back up Hartz’s guitar madman act, Reichmann could have done as well pounding on a trash-can lid.

Someone replies: Brazil’s always been “the world’s trash can.” Nothing is controlled here and the Bolivians know it. If it were a European country, they’d be afraid to walk down the street and get caught in a “razzia.” Someone replies: There are illegal immigrants all over the world my friend. What about the millions of illegal Brazilians in the US, who even commit petty crimes? He who lives in a glass house shouldn’t throw stones!

Many Scots welcome people who actively choose to live in Scotland, who made a conscious decision to come north. Others resent those known as incomers, white settlers, interlopers and a row of other denigrating terms. In his novel Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh put these paradoxical thoughts in the mind of his hero, Renton: It’s nae good blaming it oan the English for colonising us. Ah don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can’t even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We’re ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? … The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation.

Literary scholar Hamid Dabashi notes the curious case of the English language novel The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, written by a traveler named James Morier, who pretended he had merely translated a Persian original. Morier used a ridiculous diction in his novel to lampoon Persian speech and depicted Iranians as dishonest scoundrels and buffoons. Then, in the 1880s, an astounding thing happened. Iranian grammarian Mirza Habib translated Hajji Baba into Persian. Remarkably, what in English was offensive racist trash became, in translation, a literary masterpiece that laid the groundwork for a modernist Persian literary voice and “a seminal text in the course of the constitutional movement.” The ridicule that Morier directed against Iranians in an Orientalist manner, the translator redirected against clerical and courtly corruption in Iranian society, thereby transforming Hajji Baba into an incendiary political critique.2

When a writer tells you his novel has received mixed reviews, it means that after his book was trashed and his heart broken in every newspaper and magazine in America, the weekend critic at the Pekin Daily Times said it was a heart-pounding race to the finish.

He isn’t afraid to share himself with me. And I’m not ashamed to want every inch of him.

It’s funny. In my fantasies, I’ve cast Daniel as this romantic, heroic figure; my own personal knight in shining armor. When I daydream, I always imagine he’s the one saving me. But here in our silent sanctuary, I realize I want to be the one who rescues him. I want to protect him, comfort him, heal him... I want to love him.

I love you. I used to go out of my way to avoid saying that. I’d make excuses, I’d change the subject, I’d do anything to spare myself from having to speak those words. Now they seem to be the only words I’m sure of. The only ones that make any sense to me. And no matter how many times I tell you, I don’t think it will ever be enough.

Then how did he come to learn that I was back in town?” Buster said. “It’s a small town, Buster,” Mrs. Fang answered. “When you got here, you had a grotesquely swollen face. It attracted attention.” When they first arrived back home, Buster, still adjusting to the high dosage of the medication he had given himself, woke in the van and demanded that they stop for fried chicken. “Buster, I don’t think solid food is a great idea yet,” his mother had told him, but Buster had leaned into the front of the van and reached for the steering wheel, saying, over and over in a strange monotone, “Fer-ide chick-hen.” The Fangs pulled into a Kentucky Fried Chicken ten minutes later and walked inside the restaurant. Buster swayed unsteadily as his parents directed him to a table. “What do you want?” they asked him. “Fer-ide chick-hen,” he said, “all-you-can-eat.” They left the table and returned a few minutes later with a breast, wing, thigh, and leg, a mound of gravy-soaked mashed potatoes, and a biscuit. Everyone in a five-table radius was staring at the Fangs by this point. Buster, oblivious, unpacked some bloodstained gauze from his mouth, picked up the chicken leg, extra crispy, and took a ravenous bite. He felt something come loose inside his mouth, his muscles stretched beyond comfort after so much time in atrophy, and he began to moan, a funeral dirge, dropping the leg back onto the tray. The barely chewed scrap of chicken fell from his mouth, stained a foamy red with Buster’s blood. “Okay,” Mr. Fang said, sweeping the tray off of the table, dumping it into the trash. “This little experiment is over. Let’s go home.” Buster tried to pack the gauze back into his mouth, but his mother and father were already carrying him into the parking lot. “I’m a monster,” Buster bellowed, and his parents did nothing to dissuade him of this belief. “Well, I’m not going to do it,” Buster said. “I think you should,” Annie said. Mr. and Mrs. Fang agreed. Buster did not want to talk about writing. It had been years since his last novel had been published, a spectacular failure at that.

The fecundity and the importance of a literary form are often measured by the trash it contains. The number of bad novels must not make us forget the value of the best.

There's a reason why most men don't read romance: Romance novels are wish-fulfillment for women. The fictitious men in romance novels fall all over themselves trying to please a woman. Does that sound like your real life experience with men? No of course not. (Except for guys who want to fuck you. There is no man more attentive as the guy who wants to fuck you for the first time.) That's why you read romance. To get something you don't get in real life. Because your husband's idea of romance is bringing out the trash and not farting during sex.

The house stands on stilts over the water, and is a meeting place for the scum of the city!” “Sally!” her father reproved. “Well, it’s the truth! Ma Harper and her no-account husband, Claude, run an outdoor dance pavilion, but their income is derived from other sources too. Black market sales, for instance.” “Sally, your tongue is rattling like a chain!” “Pop, you know very well the Harpers are trash.” “Nevertheless, don’t make statements you can’t prove.

It’s a strange world we live in, some people's trash contains more food than some people's stomach. Things won't change until we renounce all luxury.

We collected a fee for disposing of dangerous waste. We earned money just for taking care of trash, and then earned even more from selling off that reconfigured trash.

Wolf swallowed, trying to hide his discomfort behind a cunning smile. “Uh, well, that’s your opinion, Diane.” Through a polished smile, she said, “And I’m the governor.” She turned to look at the ugly, trash-like sculpture again. “As for the sculpture: I think it’s about perspective. If you look closely, even trash can be recycled into something beautiful.” Wolf looked to where she was pointing and noticed that the sculpture’s shadow on the wall was in the shape of a gorgeous swan. Huh. “How about that?” Wolf mused. “I guess some things aren’t always as they appear.” Shaking his head to get his confidence

We emerge from prison bearing agonies that would crush a stone. How do we survive these? We transform them. We get a tattoo. We ink an entire sleeve. We cover our chest and back with swastikas, death’s-heads, and quotes in bogus Mandarin from Kill Bill, Volume Two. We blast our pecs. We pierce our flesh. We customize Harleys. We shave our skull. We craft an image of ourselves, even if it’s one—especially if it’s one—as predictable as low-ride jeans and chrome-link wallet chains. That’s art. That’s our novel. This is what the writer wrestles with. This is the passage. You pound keyboards until you wear the sonsofbitches out. Each page is trash. Unreadable. Unpublishable.

Michael Jordan: cut from his high school basketball team. Steven Spielberg: rejected from film school three times. Walt Disney: fired by the editor of a newspaper for lacking ideas and imagination. Albert Einstein: He learned to speak at a late age and performed poorly in school. John Grisham: first novel was rejected by sixteen agents and twelve publishing houses. J.K. Rowling: was a divorced, single mother on welfare while writing Harry Potter. Stephen King: his first book “Carrie” was rejected 30 times. He threw it in the trash. His wife retrieved it from the trash and encouraged him to try again. Oprah Winfrey: fired from her television reporting job as “not suitable for television.” The Beatles: told by a record company that they have “no future in show business”.

How?” He began to list off what they had to work with. “A mortal; useless trash; someone sedated to the gills; and me, a mascot. Even if the four of us offered ourselves up in a steamer basket, do you think we’d be more than an appetizer for the Hunger Ghost?

Odessa Jones probably had ancestors who, like him, were rootless white trash, but who had picked up rifles and gone North to fight the Yankees anyway, not because they believed in slavery but because they were incensed that the Northerners refused to stay at home and mind their own business.

If this group of worthless trash wants to live through this experience, they will need someone to speak for them and take responsibility. Will that be you?

doing ought to precede thinking when it comes to baseline creative work. Too much planning is a trap. Don’t fall into it. Instead of trying to plot out the perfect novel before you start writing, accept that it’ll take a few shitty drafts to get things sorted out and just start writing. Play. Enjoy the process. Write six different intros and throw five into the trash. You’ll figure a lot of it out along the way.

I’ve never said anything bad about your books.” She’s eyeing me with blatant confusion, like she can’t figure me out. Join the club. It has many members, and I don’t care. “Doesn’t mean you haven’t ruined other writers’ careers.” A tiny dent appears between her brows. “It’s my job to review books and I’m as objective as I can be. It’s a simple fact that not every book published is good. And I owe it to the New York Press readers to give my honest opinion.” It sounds like a spiel she’s recited many times before. Which means I’m not the first author to bail her up. “I’m in publishing. I know how reviews work.” I stalk to the fire and grab a poker. Her logic merely accentuates how unreasonable I’m being, and I need something to jab at, so I start prodding at the smoldering logs. “But your words hold more sway than most. Books you pump up go gangbusters, books you trash end up languishing. Surely you know that?” For the first time since we met, I glimpse an angry spark in her eyes. She’s obviously trying to impress me, to stay calm, probably with the aim to suck up. But I’ve hit a nerve and her eyes drift to the poker in my hand for a moment, like she’s imagining skewering me with it.

A people’s legitimacy is derived from its artifacts. Even a relationship isn’t a relationship unless it’s left behind its trash.

OUR PAST BRINGS US TO OUR FUTURE “I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.” —Joel 2:25 I believe in a very deep way that our past is what brings us to our future. I understand the temptation to draw an angry X through a whole season or a whole town or a whole relationship, to crumple it up and throw it away, to get it as far away as possible from a new life, a new future. In my worst moments, I want to slam the door on the hard parts of our life in Grand Rapids. Deadbolt it, forget it, move forward, happier without it. But I don’t want to lose six years of my own history behind a slammed door. These days I’m walking over and retrieving those years from the trash, erasing the X, unlocking the door. It’s the only way that darkness turns to light. I’m mining through, searching for light, and the more I look, the more I find all sorts of things Grand Rapids gave me. I see moments of heartbreak that led to honesty about myself I wouldn’t have been able to get to any other way. I am thankful for what I learned, what I became, what God gave me and what God took away during that season. WHAT HAVE the hard, dark seasons of your life yielded in light and insight and growth and gifts? Have you sifted through those times, looking for those gifts? Ask God to bring light out of that darkness. May 11 WHY WE WRITE Shout for joy to the LORD, all the earth. —Psalm 100:1 A writer friend came over yesterday. She’s written a novel. She brought over a fat, beautiful binder full of story, and I can’t wait to read it. We talked about publication and agents and sharing your work, about marketing and the internet and a million other things. And we talked about why we write. You know those conversations when you think you’re helping someone, sharing from your vast well of knowledge, only to realize that this person is actually instructing you, reminding you of something fundamental that you’ve forgotten? My friend sat across the table from me, and it seemed like she could have combusted into flames, burning with sheer, clean passion about this story. After she left, I realized that some days I forget why we write, and she reminded me. I write because other writers’ words changed my life a million and one ways, and I want to be a part of that. I began writing because there were things I wanted to say with so much urgency and soul I would have climbed a tower and shouted them, would have written them in skywriting, would have spelled them out in grains of rice if I had to.

They would have pulled it off, too, if we hadn’t already known about their plot.

You could say that Rosay had…resting scary face. I’m not one to talk, but he was terrifying. He ought to make an effective threat just by standing next to Bolorda.

I HAD TO ASK CIEL to hide for a little longer. Adandaras were incredibly rare monsters, and nobody had ever heard of one being tamed. If rumors spread, I would probably be targeted again. They wouldn’t be able to use force to get me if I had Ciel, but I had plenty of other weaknesses to take advantage of. Humans are truly ruthless creatures.

Behind me was the adandara, fangs bared, glaring daggers at Harrell. Its eyes flicked to me as it stalked up to Harrell. Then, it opened its enormous jaws wide…and Harrell fainted. I’ve never seen someone’s eyes roll back like that!

It’s baffling to me, when your hours are already so short, that you discard as many as you do in the trash-heap of what isn’t.

I looked over to Sora. The adandara was batting my friend with its front paw, rolling it around. I considered stopping them, but Sora looked like it was having fun, so I decided to watch and wait. Whenever Sora got pushed away, it would roll back to the adandara and quiver in place. When it did, the adandara would poke and roll him again. They repeated this several times. Is that fun for them?

Hanging from the proud adandara’s mouth was a big basket. It was a gift from me to Ciel, since it must’ve been really hard to carry all that prey in its mouth. The basket was full of wild rabbits and field mice.

I'm surprised to see you here on a Saturday night. Shouldn't you be out with your boyfriend or getting trashed at a party or something?” “You're the psych professor. Shouldn't you be able to deduce from the fact that I'm here alone on a Saturday night buying a trashy romance novel that I don't have a boyfriend?

The cool, unfazed way his mother just told him he was in the way with a smile on her face…she was not a woman to be crossed. It looked like her daughter-in-law wasn’t the only one.

That magic stone…it’s extremely rare, right?” “Yeah…this is my first time seeing a magic stone this transparent. It’s the rarest of the rare.” I knew it. Yeah, I definitely saw that coming…

Yeah, it has a noise-canceling function as well as a size-altering feature, so it’s bigger on the inside than it looks.

Okay, now I understand. So, ya said ya also have some failed slimes, right?” “Yes. Their names are Sora and Flame.” I pointed at the bag on my shoulder, and the old mentor gave it an eager look. “Do you want to see them?” “C-could I? I’ve seen failed slimes before, but they disappeared so quickly.

Extraordinary things seem to follow ya wherever ya go, Ivy,” Druid’s mentor chuckled. I frowned at him a little. “That’s not a good thing!

Well…it doesn’t matter if ya got one star or three stars unless you’ve got the experience to back it up. Ya can’t possibly get good at something without putting in any effort… The world ain’t a fairy tale.