Novelists From The United States

"fire flashes from the gun like a flower that blooms madness and is gone."

""Why are only white laws followed? This will kill the world. What is the law if not the earth's?" (p283)"

"How we have been pulled from the land! And how poetry has worked hard to set us free, uncage us, keep us from split tongues that mimic the voices of our captors. It returns us to our land. Poetry is a string of words that parades without a permit. It is a lockbox of words to put an ear to as we try to crack the safe of language, listening for the right combination, the treasure inside. It is life resonating. It is sometimes called Prayer, Soothsaying, Complaint, Invocation, Proclamation, Testimony, Witness. Writing is and does all these things. And like that parade, it is illegitimately insistent on going its own way, on being part of the miracle of life, telling the story about what happened when we were cosmic dust, what it means to be stars listening to our human atoms."

"As an Indian woman, I come from a long history of people who have listened to the language of this continent, people who have known that corn grows with the songs and prayers of the people, that it has a story to tell, that the world is alive...This intuitive and common language is what I seek for my writing, work in touch with the mystery and force of life, work that speaks a few of the many voices around us...It is also poetry, this science, and I note how often scientific theories lead to the world of poetry and vision, theories telling us how atoms that were stars have been transformed into our living, breathing bodies. And in these theories, or maybe they should be called stories, we begin to understand how we are each many people, including the stars we once were, and how we are in essence the earth and the universe, how what we do travels clear around the earth and returns. In a single moment of our living, there is our ancestral and personal history, our future, even our deaths planted in us and already growing toward their fulfillment. The corn plants are there, and like all the rest we are forever merging our borders with theirs in the world collective. Our very lives might depend on this listening. In the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the wind told the story that was being suppressed by the people. It gave away the truth. It carried the story of danger to other countries. It was a poet, a prophet, a scientist. Sometimes, like the wind, poetry has its own laws speaking for the life of the planet. It is a language that wants to bring back together what the other words have torn apart. It is the language of life speaking through us about the sacredness of life."

"A friend's father, watching the United States stage another revolution in another Third World country, said, "Why doesn't the government just feed people and then let the political chips fall where they may?" He was right. It was easy, obvious, even financially more reasonable to do that, to let democracy be chosen because it feeds hunger."

"She slept on the ground of the cave that night, feeling the land, feeling it move up through her. She saw her own self lying there, a white-haired woman, a strong woman, part of earth's terrain. In the cave she remembered how there was hope in the land, hope and tomorrow living in the veins and stones of earth. She remembered that the river was going to the sea, had been rain clouds and lakes. It had been snow. Now it was on its journey back to the great first waters of life."

"It was a beautiful night, and she thought how wonderful it was to look out without fear (p373)"

"When I sit down at the desk, there are other women who are hungry, homeless. I don't want to forget that, that the world of matter is still there to be reckoned with. This writing is a form of freedom most other people do not have. So, when I write, I feel a responsibility, a commitment to other humans and to the animal and plant communities as well."

"writing has changed me. And there is the powerful need we all have to tell a story, each of us with a piece of the whole pattern to complete. As Alice Walker says, We are all telling part of the same story, and as Sharon Olds has said, Every writer is a cell on the body politic of America."

"Writing begins for me with survival, with life and with freeing life, saving life, speaking life. It is work that speaks what can't be easily said. It originates from a compelling desire to live and be alive. For me, it is sometimes the need to speak for other forms of life, to take the side of human life, even our sometimes frivolous living, and our grief-filled living, our joyous living, our violent living, busy living, our peaceful living. It is about possibility. It is based in the world of matter. I am interested in how something small turns into an image that is large and strong with resonance, where the ordinary becomes beautiful. I believe the divine, the magic, is here in the weeds at our feet, unacknowledged. What a world this is. Where else could water rise up to the sky, turn into snow crystals, magnificently brought together, fall from the sky all around us, pile up billions deep, and catch the small sparks of sunlight as they return again to water?"

"live so nothing will be left for death at the end"

"It’s as if everything breathes, hard and desperate, the land, the house, the water. The wind is a living force. We Taiga call the wind Oni. It enters us all at birth and stays with us all through life. It connects us to every other creature."

"[On the early years of the AIDS crisis in New York City.] It was 1982 when we figured that something was really wrong. It was terrible — a kind of plague. I was 33 and the average age of the guys I knew was 36. Between 1979 and 84, about 35 of them died. All in the most horrific way. What was so awful was that everyone thought it was contagious, so they weren’t allowed in the hospital. People stopped shaking hands or kissing when they saw each other. Ivan got ill in 1983. That’s when the lesions started showing up on his face and people would run from us in the street."

"The last time I saw him was at the Columbia medical centre. I walked past this room and saw a guy who looked about 75 and really sick — all shrivelled up, with no hair or teeth. It took me a moment to realise it was Ivan. His body looked lifeless, like there was no blood or sweat in him. But even when he was this bag of bones that could hardly move, he still said that all he needed was rehabilitation and he would get better. Inside I was screaming and thinking: "How could this happen?" But on the outside I was saying: "Yeah, we’ll see what we can do." After the funeral I left for London. The theatre scene in New York had been decimated, and with so many people dying around me I felt it was important that I made the most of my life. I needed to escape the shadow of death."

"Too often, America - the Atlantic model - is cited in policymaking for black Britain. Aside from our similar racial origins, however, black America and black Britain have less in common than meets the eye. Black America is largely monolithic and our roots tend to be Southern Baptist and rural. We have roughly the same accent as a result of segregation and its consequent restriction of movement. We have lived continuously on American soil, most of that time in slavery, for more than half a millennium. (These, by the way, are some of the elements that make Barack Obama seem alien to many black Americans.) Black Britain, on the other hand, is international. It is urban. It has no rural history in this country. Within the living experience and memory of all black Britons are other countries, other cultures. And ironically, because of the impact of biraciality, the term "black" may not define black Britain in the future at all. Therefore, black Britain should concentrate on life as lived here."

"My advice for writers? Just get it out. You can fix bad pages. You can't fix no pages."

"Nick Griffin and many viewers, I’m sure, would have wanted, even expected, me to come across as an abrasive, point-scoring, shouty, finger-pointing black woman. That would have played into Griffin’s game plan, because that is the view of his party. The BNP portrayed me as a "black history fabricator" on its website. There was no way that I was going to live up to any negative mental pictures that it would have had about me, or of any other black woman. Even at the risk of looking "ineffective"."

"Being young don’t earn you a damn thing in my book."

"All the old men set to their jobs with the grim robotic work ethic that always belongs to the previous generation."

"Change scares people. Makes them dangerous."

"“Most people are good,” says Jim. “But not when they’re afraid.”"

"Humans need technology. It’s the one thing that we do better than any other animal. We communicate, cooperate, and make tools to extend our reach. Every new tool changes us."

"In the grand scheme of things, all human beings are part of the same family, regardless of origin. The divisions we have built between ourselves along the lines of race and geography are illusions. If our species is ultimately able to see past these biases, it will be our shared genetic stamp of humanness that will outlive the cultural contrivances that distract us in our day-to-day lives."

"It has been subsequently theorized that our species’ seeming inability to focus on long-term existential threats will inexorably lead to the destruction of our environment, overpopulation, and resource exhaustion. It is therefore not an uncommon belief among economists that this inborn deficit represents a sort of built-in timer for the self-destruction of human civilization. Sadly, all the evidence of world history supports this theory."

"Compartmentalized knowledge is a mainstay of spycraft and necessary for any governmental information dissemination process."

"“This is doable, isn’t it?” she asked. “Technically, it’s doable,” he replied, looking up at her. “It’s insane. But it’s doable.” “Then that will have to be enough,” said Vedala."

"I’ve heard it said that technology makes a good person better, and it makes a bad person worse. That’s okay with me. I say we keep building new versions of ourselves, keep exploring the unknown, and keep growing. We’re gonna be fine. Different, but fine. Because most people are good. Right?"

"It is a well-established Achilles’ heel of human civilization that individuals are more motivated by immediate private reward than by long-term, collective future benefits. This effect is particularly evident when considering payoffs that will take longer than a generation to arrive—a phenomenon called intragenerational discounting."

"The moment of silence stretched out as thin as the content of a congressman’s speech."

"“Don’t die for…a dream…”"

"Anachronistic as this labyrinthine mythology may appear to the foreign mind, many of India's ancient theories about the universe are startlingly modem in scope and worthy of a people who are credited with the invention of the zero, as well as algebra and its application of astronomy and geometry; a people who so carefully observed the heavens that, in the opinion of Monier- Williams, they determined the moon's synodical revolution much more correctly than the Greeks." This notion of the sleeping and waking, or contracting and expanding, of the Life Force, so long a part of Hindu cosmology, has recently been expressed in relevant terms in an article written for a British scientific journal by Professor Fred Hoyle, Britain's foremost astronomer. " "Plainly, contemporary Western science's description of an astronomical universe of such vast magnitude that distances must be measured in terms as abstract as light-years is not new to Hinduism whose wise men, millennia ago, came up with the term kalpa to signify the inconceivable duration of the period elapsing between the beginning and end of a world system." "It is clear that Indian religious cosmology is sharply at variance with that inherited by Western peoples from the Semites. On the highest level, when stripped of mythological embroidery, Hinduism's conceptions of space, time and multiple universes approximate in range and abstraction the most advanced scientific thought." "Hinduism created such arresting icons as the divine two-in-one embrace of Shiva and Shakti; or Shiva alone, half male, half female, or the two-sided figure of Hari-Hara, an expression of the seemingly "opposite" creative-destructive forces of Vishnu and Shiva embodied in one being"

"“You can judge a god, an ideal, by the people who worship it, Tom.”"

"“Rod, you are jumping to conclusions.” “No, just coming up with a brilliant flash of insight.”"

"The important thing about a revolution is that it begin; you can always take control of it later."

"“We shall win, for the honor of Plantagenet or Gramarye, or die nobly.” “I have yet,” Rod said tightly, “to see a noble death in battle. They’re all just a little on the messy side.”"

"But revolutionaries are always out of place when the revolution is over, and are likely to prove an embarrassing factor to the police forces of the new government."

"Democracy, the only practical compromise between totalitarianism and anarchy."

"One huge bas relief in particular stuns us with its fluid elegance in depicting the Hindu creation myth, "churning the sea of milk" In a union between gods and demons, the giant serpent Vasuki is pulled back and forth between the monkey god, Hanuman, and a line of demons. Vasuki who has wrapped himself around Mount Mandara, is supported by a giant turtle in the Sea of Milk, the ocean of immortality. As Vishnu overseas this diville rhythm of opposites, the gods and demons rotate the mountain and chum the sea into foam, releasing a seminal fluid which creates a divine ambrosia, or amrita, the essence of elixir of life. Much of the bas-relief has faded from centuries of worshippers rubbing their hands over the figures, but overall it is still exquisitely defined."

"Angkor wat has overpowered as much as inspired me. It is as if I've trapped myself my wishing for relief, for a transcendent moment, or even, on a more banal level, a catalyst that would revive our sagging energies. The magnificence of the sheer mass of Angkor Wat, the weight and abundance of imagery has become oppressive. I am disoriented by so much visual grandeur."

"We stumble around the massive solemnity of this temple mountain, which offers not so much solace or refuge as It does awe and even a shiver of atavistic fear at the omniscience of its precision. It is a place of power, once ruled by Hindu devarajas, under whose totality religious art and sculpture reflect Shiva and Vishnu ...."

"Patriots all, who have forgotten or deserted the higher patriotism with which they had lived and from which their art drew its strength."

"On the revolutionary battle-field there are no soldiers, called to the front with as little power to resist as the machine guns that they drag with them. There are comrades—men and women, infatuated with freedom, who have risen to establish a home of equal hospitality to all, and to cause the dream of fellowship to come to pass upon this earth."

"For home and country —but all homes are his home, all countries are his too. He has no separate home and country,"

"It is a universal suicide they are committing. In place of the fraternity which yesterday existed, there is distilled to-day the poisonous fumes of nationalistic patriotism which threatens to cover the earth with darkness for another fifty years."

"The French Revolution brought into the world the conception of society, of the Third Estate. Before that we had institutions, religion, caste, government, but the people did not exist. The Revolution extended the idea of the people as far as the Rhine."

"You cannot conquer an awakened people. You cannot Prussianize Belgium and France. You cannot eradicate the teachings of Marx and Engels from the minds of hundreds of thousands of German Socialists. Surely they would find some way of uniting in spirit and in deed with the comrades of other nations in case of such an invasion on the part of a government which they had always understood and denounced. Disarmament is not non-resistance. It is a resistance which must carry everything before it. It is raising the battle-field to a higher plane upon which the nobler and better must conquer, where today almost as surely they must fail. It is to practice a resistance unknown in history. It is a modernism which partakes of the future society which it goes to build up."

"We progress, we develop ourselves ; then comes a call to arms, and all is swallowed up. The last vestiges of civilization are gone. We ourselves become war-mad. A reversal of everything takes place. Instead of preparing for life in its multitudinous and beautiful forms we prepare for death —night covers everything. We sink further into the slime of the abyss. We lose our humanity"

"cowardice is itself a military conception. He does not want to understand military morality. He knows only the courage of principle."

"A scientist, humanitarian and of royal birth, Kropotkin is a genius of the age; not only does his colossal intellect cause him to stand in bold relief, but his personality is one of indescribable and unduplicated power."

"The author was not hostile to India but he was doing his best to depict Hindus and their history as he knew it."