Novelists From The United States

"I want the word that burns into my heartLike God's coal alive on the Prophet's tongue.I would listen now while memory is ablazeTo seal your testament within my soul."

"Paranoia is infectious. It’s also an incredibly useful tool. If you can make people afraid enough, uncertain enough, they will simply stop moving."

"“You’re supposed to be here making things better.” He grimaced. “I’ve come to the conclusion that that’s the first mistake. This place is rotten to the core. Trying to make it better just gets the rotten on you.”"

"This is what hope does to you when you’re not used to it. It is very like being drunk. You don’t realize how badly you’re impaired until you see the results of your spree."

"As threats went, it was not subtle, nor was it original. But it was one of those things that had stayed around because it tended to work."

"There are some things that do not change. Where there are valuable goods, there will be thieves. Where there are thieves, there will be people who organize them—and take most of the profits."

"Somehow, you expect places you’ve left to freeze, like your memories of them have. It’s egotistical, but no one really wants to believe the world goes on without them."

"“I’m starting to get the picture.” “If you can say it so calmly, then you haven’t.”"

"He did not like Ambassador Bern’s diplomatic response. Probably he was the sort that preferred to be the only liar in the room."

"Power looks startlingly similar wherever you go. Power does not want you to forget that you are small and alone."

"When all else fails, be willing to look like a fool. Maybe they will underestimate you later about something really important."

"He found me fascinating, in a wounded-bird kind of way. I found him wonderful, in a lifeline kind of way. It was mutual need that passed for love, and got married."

"For a moment hope, bright and cruel as a knife, presented itself to me. It took every ounce of strength I had to turn away."

"I've let you teach too many science fiction classes," I said. Dr. Identity's pupils mutated into large asterisks. "It's possible. More likely, however, I'm just a product of the future. and the future's been extinct for a long time."

"I think I always see a young child or an adolescent of color, but not necessarily right this minute. I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy—a yearning I had as a teenager. I hate that word. But as an adolescent—to have done something that I didn't have and I didn't know what it was 'cause I had never heard about it…"

"We realized we were on our own and started bonding together, Latina women writers like Cherrie Moraga, Jewelle Gomez, black writers like Audre Lorde and Ntozake Shange, who wrote For Colored Women, we understood we had to support each other or nobody would."

"There is a line in Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enough. In the play, the woman in purple speaks after having struggled to deal with all the psychic and physical aspects of herself that the culture ignores or demeans. She sums herself up in these wise and peaceful words: “here is what i have . . ./poems/big thighs/lil tits/&/so much love”. This is the power of the body, our power, the power of the wildish woman."

"I went to a concert where Ntozake Shange was reading. There, everything exploded for me. She was speaking a language that I knew-in the deepest parts of me-existed, and that I had ignored in my own feminist studies and even in my own writing. What Ntozake caught in me is the realization that in my development as a poet, I have, in many ways, denied the voice of my brown mother-the brown in me. I have acclimated to the sound of a white language which, as my father represents it, does not speak to the emotions in my poems-emotions which stem from the love of my mother. The reading was agitating. Made me uncomfortable. Threw me into a week-long terror of how deeply I was affected. I felt that I had to start all over again. That I turned only to the perceptions of white middle-class women to speak for me and all women. I am shocked by my own ignorance."

"Robert Staples sees in Ntozake Shange's play For Colored Girls "a collective appetite for black male blood." Yet it is my female children and my Black sisters who lie bleeding all around me, victims of the appetites of our brothers."

"I used to have boundaries up all the time, which is limiting. I never want to feel limited. If anything is life changing, being the descendant of a slave is. I went into therapy 10 years ago because I needed to work that out. I’ve gotten better. Everything about me is more fluid, much less rigid. I’m gonna do everything I can, feel everything I can, until it hurts. Then I’ll stop. All they did was buy us–it’s not an honor, it’s just something that happened. Our gifts belong to us."

"it doesn’t matter where I live. Just give me a room to write in."

"Multiculturalism is a white people joke. Black people have always been here as different. People need to stop saying that there is one way to be–and then the issue will disappear. I don’t tell Navajos they can’t speak Navajo. I don’t tell Asians they can’t eat noodles. Because black people have refused to eat potatoes and cabbage, white people are terrified. Now that we’re saying “I’m talkin’ Zulu, I’m changin’ my name, my child’s goin’ to a black school with Muslims,” white people get upset and have to call it something. Multiculturalism isn’t about culture, it’s about power."

"No. I’m not trying to go away from anybody. I don’t go where my feelings get hurt. If you’re going to be nice to me, I’ll come."

"I write for young girls of color, for girls who don’t even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive. I can only change how they live, not how they think. I want to say, “Here, look where you can live, look what you can think.” I concentrate on giving this to young people because they are the treasurers of black culture."

"I have spent my life undoing language until it works for me. We must not only repossess the language, we must deslaveryize it."

"Hopefully, these characters bring us closer to a sense of self: honest and honored. Icons: Toussaint L'Ouverture to José Martí to lesser known heroes, Atahualpa and Denmark Vesey. We lace our visions with Celia Cruz and Aretha Franklin."

"We must not let our oppression deny us the earth."

"i found god in myself & i loved her/i loved her fiercely"

"…gender is cultural: we have menarche to deal with, virginity, menopause, pregnancy, childbirth; these things are unavoidable. And in some places they've been wise enough to have ritual and ceremony about significant events. It is unfortunate in our culture-meaning north American mainstream culture—that all this has been minimized to the point where little girls are even afraid to say that they are starting to menstruate when they should be very happy. Grown women are afraid to say that they are approaching the menopause, when that means that they have lived a whole successful life. They've lived so long that they can have this…"

"…I think unless black women are writing the pieces, we're being left out the same way we used to be left out of literature. We don't appear in things unless we write them ourselves. In the white male literary establishment women attain what looks like positions of power or influence or economic stability, but they're structured in such a way that they become unthreatening."

"…The characters in Sassafras did say awful things and trash one another, but there are people who do. In the time of the Sassafras narrative certain women's collectives existed that were very dramatic and people had a lot of lovers. We didn't even call it promiscuity. It was very different from the environment today. People today sit down and think about how they really want to be monogamous. It was not anybody's goal fifteen years ago."

"Success comes on God’s terms, in His time, and in His way. God only allowed me to have success after I’d been broken after I’d stopped seeking success for myself, and after I’d come to terms with the idea that my labors for God might not ever bring me a penny. It was only after I’d lost everything that God was able to get my heart right to the point where He could trust me with success."

"One fine evening I was having a conversation with Algis Budrys about rewriting and why so many writers believed that myth [that rewriting was necessary or essential]. He shrugged and said, "They don't know any better and no one has the courage to tell them." So I asked him if he ever thought rewriting could fix a flawed story. His answer was clear and I remember it word-for-word to this day: "No matter how many times you stir up a steaming pile of crap, it's still just a steaming pile of crap.""

"Engineers do not particularly like PR men."

"I had had a good life. A somewhat shorter one than I had anticipated, but I had had the money, I had had the girls, and nobody told me what to do. Is there, really, anything else? Are you sure?"

"Nobody liked him. Nobody loved him—and this bothered him. But everyone kowtowed to him, and that, it seems, was what he held most precious."

"I understood, even then, that without question the best way to understand these people was to understand their infatuation with cars."

"Cars seemed to me to speak more clearly of Earth than any single thing else."

"Well, you know, you do that kind of thing when you’re young. Then you get older. I think maybe most of the elders know all about that. They see but they don’t say, because they know everybody gets older."

"It’s amazing how self-perpetuating ignorance is."

"Any intelligent race you can hope to someday relate to is going to have to come up essentially the same developmental roads and deal with the physical laws of the Universe in about the same way."

"“I—ah—have some idea.” “You argue?” “I propose.” “Marriage?” “No. Another form of dialectical antagonism.”"

"“I hate acting on probability.” “You go to your church and I’ll go to mine.”"

"“Bribes,” Michaelmas said. “They always go to bribes when they’re not sure they’re on top, and coercion when they are. That’s all they know. They really don’t believe anyone would help them just on their own merits.”"

"The horse is a stubborn, dirty, stupid animal that reminds me of a sheep. Its only use is to embody the wings a man feels within him, and to do this it lathers and sweats, defecates and steps in badger holes."

"I don’t know...but then, if God had intended Man to think, He would have given him brains, I suppose."

"“Even so, we’re the only animal whose signals can’t be trusted by its own kind.” He smiled. “Except for thee and me, of course.”"

"The way the world worked, once the word was out, the effect would take on exhaustibility. There was always not merely the event itself, but opinion of the event, and rebuttal of the opinion, and the ready charge of self-interest, and the countercharge. There was the analysis of the event, and the excavation of the root causes of the event, and the placement of the event in the correct historical context. Everyone would want to kick the can, and it would clatter over the cobblestones interminably, far from the toes of those who’d first impelled it."

"It’s good for us; hot breath on your heels is what keeps you on your toes."

"“The world is full of confusing coincidences.” “And a man’s mind insists on making patterns from random data.”"