Novelists From The United States

"If the will is there, the method will be found."

"Obviously Mother Culture must be finished off if you’re going to survive, and that’s something the people of your culture can do. She has no existence outside your minds. Once you stop listening to her, she ceases to exist."

"But, alas, a law is catching up to them. They don’t know such a law even exists, but this ignorance affords them no protection from its effects."

"The gazelle and the lion are enemies only in the minds of the Takers."

"I no longer think of what we’re doing as a blunder. We’re not destroying the world because we’re clumsy. We’re destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it."

"Once you exempt yourself from the law of limited competition, everything in the world except your food and the food of your food becomes an enemy to be exterminated."

"“‘Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population.’ Peter Farb said it in Humankind.” “You said it was a paradox?” “No, he said it was a paradox.” “Why?” Ishmael shrugged. “I’m sure he knows that any species in the wild will invariably expand to the extent that its food supply expands. But, as you know, Mother Culture teaches that such laws do not apply to man.”"

"The law we’re looking for here is much like that with respect to civilizations. It’s not about civilizations, but it applies to civilizations in the same way that it applies to flocks of birds and herds of deer. It makes no distinction between human civilizations and beehives. It applies to all species without distinction. This is one reason why the law has remained undiscovered in your culture. According to Taker mythology, man is by definition a biological exception. Out of all the millions of species, only one is an end product."

"... I was interested in the different ways that the world has treated men and women. And I wanted to look at that in the context of a marriage."

"... when I was a child, I used to tell myself ... serial novels in my head. I had a novel that I told myself, on the way to school, about the two heirs to the Kraft cheese fortune. ... I think it's because ... my mother, busy writing, gave us a lot of Kraft macaroni and cheese."

"In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge; no one knows anything that can’t be found on a shelf in the public library."

"Five severed fingers do not make a hand."

"People say that I’m sour and misanthropic, and I tell them they’re probably right. Argument of any sort, on any subject, has always seemed like a waste of time to me."

"We live in a world where you could go for the rest of your life never reading a book — after school. And that to me is a sad fate ... because books hold so much."

"... I shouldn't write a novel to keep up with every event."

"The Leavers and the Takers are enacting two separate stories, based on entirely different and contradictory premises."

"“As the Takers see it, the gods gave man the same choice they gave Achilles: a brief life of glory or a long, uneventful life in obscurity. And the Takers chose a brief life of glory.” “Yes, that’s certainly how it’s understood. People just shrug and say, ‘Well, this is the price that had to be paid for indoor plumbing and central hearing and air conditioning and automobiles and all the rest.’” I gave him a quizzical look. “And what are you saying?” “I’m saying that the price you’ve paid is not the price of becoming human. It’s not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It’s the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.”"

"The problem is that man’s conquest of the world has itself devastated the world."

"We don’t need prophets to tell us how to live; we can find out for ourselves by consulting what’s actually there."

"There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will act like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now."

"It’s pointless to argue with mythology."

"Tiphanie Yanique is a writer to watch, a writer to read, a writer to love."

"It is not only a question of whether the American way of life is superior, but whether the American way of life is sustainable. Can we really continue to exploit the resources of the Caribbean for our own benefit without consequences?"

"People often forget that they too are subject to the whims of the sea, that their flesh and bone can be pulled down and swallowed up just like anything else. But the sea remembers. It remembers everything, from the smallest broken shell to the largest sunken ship."

"What right did these white people have to be here in the first place, stealing our land and making our people slaves? And now they have the audacity to try to buy us back from the French like we are nothing more than property?"

"We live in a world where the powerful can do what they want and the rest of us just have to accept it"

"Tiphanie Yanique's writing is like a warm embrace from a wise and insightful friend."

"Tiphanie Yanique's voice is a siren song, pulling you in with its beauty and urgency, and leaving you transformed.""

"We all have our own island, the one we carry with us wherever we go."

"America is not the only country in the world, nor is it the best. It is a new country, with new ways, but it is not the only way, nor is it the best way."

"I cannot explain to you the sensation of drowning. Suffice it to say that it is not peaceful, not tranquil, not even very dramatic, but rather an ongoing tragedy of gargling, choking, spewing out water, gasping for breath."

"Being oneself is truly living. Gandhiji said, "If I don't live the truth, I am and will never be free." And being free is the essence of expressing oneself and Being. This is Moksha-Dharma and Moksha-that is what I am interested in. Dharma is the honesty of oneself with oneself."

"England and America are industrialized societies and therefore have a very superficial culture, what do they call it, a "horizontal" culture. They have lost touch with themselves, that is with a deeper, spiritual dimension. It is only out of this deeper experience that great literature arises...It is hard to be truly spiritual in a country like England today. Except Kathleene Raine, who writes authentic poetry in England today?"

"(F.J.: How do we define the classics?) Rao: Whatever talks of realities, not supposed realities, interests me. Iread the classics because of their concerns with fundamentals. The classics are concerned only with fundamentals; otherwise, they wouldn't endure. I would much rather read a great spiritual writer like Dostoevsky or Valery than what is written today. Why read a superficial novel when I could read the Mahabharata or Shankaracharya?...(F.J. Could you name the key classics for you? Rao: The Odyssey, Tristan und Isolde, Genji in Japan, Chinese classical poetry, and of course the Indian literature of all ages. The revival of old Greek myths, in the contemporary literature of France, is very important The classics are always contemporary because they speak of our essential relation to love, life and death. (F.J.: Is the cultural context important here?) Rao: There is no cultural context to love, life and death - Hamlet is universal. Orpheus, Oedipus- these are the fundamental myths of man."

"we are here after Joyce, and Joyce was very daring, very creative. Now we must all be very daring, and do what we want with the language we use."

"“I am a man of silence. And words emerge from that silence with light, of light, and light is sacred. One wonders that there is the word at all ‐Sabda-‐and one asks oneself, where did it come from? How does it arise? I have asked this question for many, many years. I’ve asked it of linguists, I’ve asked it of poets, I’ve asked it of scholars. The word seems to come first as an impulsion from the nowhere, and then as a prehension, and it becomes less and less esoteric – – till it begins to be concrete. And the concrete becoming ever more earthy, and the earthy communicated, as the common word, alas, seems to possess least of that original light. The writer or the poet is he who seeks back the common word to its origin of silence that the manifested word become light. […] Thus the word coming of light is seen eventually by light. That is, every word-image is seen by light, and that is its meaning. Therefore the effort of the writer, if he’s sincere, is to forget himself in the process and go back to the light from which words come. Go back where? Those who read or those who hear must reach back to their own light. And that light I think is prayer.”"

"“We cannot write like the English. We should not. We can write only as Indians” because the “tempo of Indian life must be infused into our English expression. . . . We, in India, think quickly, and when we move we move quickly.” ... “There must be something in the sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on. . . . Episode follows episode, and when our thoughts stop our breath stops, and we move on to another thought. This was and still is the ordinary style of our storytelling.”"

"In the ancient bardic tradition the bards sang only of love and death. Certainly these twin themes encompass the whole of human experience. Loving, celebrating, and joining are the source of life, but they necessarily occur against a background of potential extinction. Thus, these themes become the spindle and loom of the poets’ weavings, for from the interplay of connection and disconnection come our most significant understandings of ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our tradition, our past."

"Timelessness—that place where one is whole."

"We are the dead and the witnesses to death of hundreds of thousands of our people, of the water, the air, the animals and forests and grassy lands that sustained them and us not so very long ago."

"Indians endure—both in the sense of living through something so complete in its destructiveness that the mere presence of survivors is a testament to the human will to survive and in the sense of duration or longevity."

"Reconciling the opposites of life and death, of celebration and grief, of laughter and rage is no simple task, yet it is one worthy of our best understanding and our best effort. If, in all these centuries of death, we have continued to endure, we must celebrate that fact and the fact of our vitality in the face of what seemed, to many, inevitable extinction. For however painful and futile our struggle becomes, we have but to look outside at the birds, the deer, and the seasons to understand that change does not mean destruction, that life, however painful and even elusive it is at times, contains much joy and hilarity, pleasure and beauty for those who live within its requirements with grace."

"There is a permanent wilderness in the blood of an Indian, a wilderness that will endure as long as the grass grows, the wind blows, the rivers flow, and one Indian woman remains alive."

"American Indians are not merely doomed victims of western imperialism or progress; they are also the carriers of the dream that most activist movements in the Americas claim to be seeking. The major difference between most activist movements and tribal societies is that for millennia American Indians have based their social systems, however diverse, on ritual, spirit-centered, woman-focused world-views."

"The community is the greatest threat to the American Individual Ethic; and it is the community that must be punished and destroyed. Not because Americans take much conscious notice of community, but because community is what a human being must have to be human in any sense, and community is what Americans deny themselves - in the name of progress, in the name of growth. In the name of Freedom. In the name of the Hero...It is not so strange that everyman-America hates and fears Communism. The very word strikes at the root of the American way and at the heart of the American sickness: a communist is one who must depend on others. A communist is one who must cooperate. A communist is one who must share. (2. "The Savages in the Mirror: Phantoms and Fantasies in America")"

"In America, law substitutes for custom. In America, society substitutes for love of family, comrade, village, or tribe. Walden is the self-proclaimed triumph of the isolated, superior individual. Alone with nature, not in it. Not of it. One can be with it as a scholar is with a book, but as an observer, not a creative participant. (2. "The Savages in the Mirror: Phantoms and Fantasies in America")"

"The planet, our mother, Grandmother Earth, is physical and therefore a spiritual, mental, and emotional being. Planets are alive, as are all their by-products or expressions, such as animals, vegetables, minerals, climatic and meteorological phenomena. Believing that our mother, the beloved earth, is inert matter is destructive to yourself. (There's little you can do to her, believe it or not.) Such beliefs point to a dangerously diseased physicality. Being good, holy, and/or politically responsible means being able to accept whatever life brings and that includes just about everything you usually think of as unacceptable, like disease, death, and violence. Walking in balance, in harmony, and in a sacred manner requires staying in your body, accepting its discomforts, decayings, witherings, and blossomings and respecting them. Your body is also a planet, replete with creatures that live in and on it."

"Two exceedingly important creative and political lives."

"Can we, as scholars and teachers facing the twenty-first century, fail to realize that "something there is that does not love a wall"? Can we in all good conscience persist in walling off the mainstream of American literature for a tiny group of writers, and from the great majority of writers in this century? Isn't it time we realized the absurdity of calling a tiny brook a mainstream, consigning the great river to marginality? It certainly makes the margins the center of the action-an odd way for margins to act! Surely in this time we can cease to behave as though Thoreau's Walden Pond requires we keep literature forever enclosed. Even Henry David came out of prison in time! Let's join him. Let's open ourselves to multiplicity, and let the winds of change and of life blow freely through our conversations."

"She was a poet. She was an activist. She was a writer. And she was a bold believer in a different world. And, you know, she was a poet. She was a writer of poetry books. But she also, you know, fought for the women’s right to vote. She was an organizer in the labor movement, big sacrificer for some of the rights that we have today and sort of—not sort of. She’s a legend, I guess, beyond our family and did a lot of—did a lot of things that helped shape this country. And to me, you know, as—to me and our generation, I think we still derive a lot of courage from the courage that she had."