Novelists From The United States

"With the thought came the recollection of a poem he had once heard read, about a mouse so frightened it went to the cat for love."

"Over and over our plans foundered on human nature. On the mediocrity of human nature that betrays its better self, its best ideals, that is unworthy of itself everywhere. "Shocking, the mediocrity of everything - is it not?"

"What's going on out there," Rheinhardt said, "is there are like a few billion people walking around and every one of them has a head with a lot of stuff going on in it."

"But you got to hang on, she thought. You got to hang on because if you lose hold you'll just break up and drift off and go washin' off the edge of this fuckin' world, you'll just melt down into a sprinkle of powder with nobody there, you'll be sawdust for them to sweep up or spit into."

"It brought him to a latticed gate over which a small, iron Christ stared down in wide-eyed rusty death from the gibbet of a green, oxidised cross."

"This way madness lies."

"Honey, this town has got just one principal industry where girls is concerned. They can call it what they like but it generally always ends you up in the same position."

"If somebody ever tells you, Geraldine, that they need you, you tell them to buy a dog."

"You goin' to get killed one time, you know that?" "You don't never get out of this world alive."

"You and I, my boy, compose a tiny island of sanity in what is otherwise a fucking nuthouse."

"A different voice sounded from the field now, an old man's voice. "Where are they now," the voice asked sadly, "those godly farms, the dear little streets of homely homes and friendly faces? Ploughed under, I say, or about to be - in this black age of arrogance and agitation, misfits and miscegenation! Friends, a teeming rootless rabble gnaws at the sacred fabric of our way of life. The sun shone less brightly on God's country this morning.""

"When you stir up the bottom you naturally bring up some big fish."

"There were two hungers and an illusion of fulfilment."

"She did not want to bury him here, she thought, under a twisted wire cross. There was a stone vault for him under the lime trees in California, where he could sleep with all those other shadows who had worn down their steps on carpeted altars by candlelight. Broken their hearts, minds, sex and entrails in the imperfect service of their Holy One, their Hanged Man."

"There's a story about how people are," Holliwell told Pablo. "It's about a buffalo and a scorpion. I'm sure you've heard it. "A scorpion comes up to a buffalo on a riverbank. Please, sir, says the scorpion - could you give us a ride across? No way, says the buffalo. You'll sting me and I'll drown. But the scorpion swears he won't. Why would I, he asks the buffalo, when if I did, I'd drown along with you? So off they go. Halfway across the scorpion stings the buffalo. And the poor buffalo says, you bastard, you killed us both. Before they go under, the scorpion says - it's my nature."

"He thought she was a unicorn to be speared, penned, and adored. He wanted her white goodness, wanted a skin of it. He wanted to wash in it, to drink and drink and drink of it."

"It can't be an easy thing," Lucas said, "to make a country. It's tough enough to make a café. Or to make one be the way you imagined it. Unless you only let certain people in and keep the rest out."

"You see," Heath said, "I'm the wrath of God in my tiny way. I don't go seeking out the misguided and the perverse, not at all. Those afflicted find me. I'm the shark on the bottom of the lagoon. You have to sink a damn long way before you get to me. When you do, I'm waiting."

"The Deep Six comes for all, babe, the rich man and Lazarus."

""And stay away from the wrong people." "You never know who's who," Lucas said."

""I know that in the United States people are what they choose to be," he said."

"They don't worry too much if they get the wrong man," Ernest said. "They reckon whoever they get is probably guilty of something. Or would have been eventually. And if he didn't do anything, he probably wanted to."

"Talking in whispers, we passed places where the white snow had been gashed deep by shell craters, and at last we came to the front line post-of-command. The officer here greeted us in a tired voice saying we should go no further, as this forest had only yesterday been retaken from the Russians whose lines were a few hundreds yards ahead, and his men had not had time to dig safe trenches. Beyond us was no real front line but only machine gun nests, dugouts and a few shallow trenches, a place where it was not safe for any man to crawl who had not first seen the country by clear light of day. But perhaps we would like to go down into his front line command post dugout, talk to his men and see their Christmas tree."

"There are just so many mysteries about people wanting to presume their pain has more of a reality than someone else’s pain. And I think all the holy persons of all backgrounds and faiths have always called upon us to empathize in a more profound way, to stretch our imaginations to what that other person might be experiencing. And it sounds so basic, but these days, when you listen to the loud voices, you wonder, what’s happened to that? What’s happened to the awareness that we don’t have to be vindictive and continue on in a cycle of revenge and violence?"

"Making liberty tradable merchandise paves the way to ending independence. Everything becomes a commodity, even freedom."

"“Why isn’t the government already whole-hog totalitarian?” Frizz cocked his head slightly, peering at her, happy she had asked. “Because they stumbled upon something better. No need to forcibly hold back the people. You don’t even need to prevent information from getting out—although sometimes, stupidly, they still do. Instead, you set up a megaMedia so pervasive that other news doesn’t really count.” He was getting worked up not, throwing his arms around while he spoke. “If the megaMedia doesn’t cover something, it ain’t news. Who cares what some intellectual magazine has to say, or some tiny alternative news channel. You let everybody talk, but you make sure only a few folks are listened to."

"That feeling of being connected to someone else, when you allow yourself to be very particular, is another mystery of writing."

"You can sit down and write three sentences — how long does that take, three minutes, five minutes? — and be giving yourself a very rare gift of listening to yourself, just finding out, when you go back and look at what you wrote. And how many times we think, “Oh, I would never have remembered that if I hadn’t written it down — when and how did that even occur to me? I sort of like it, this week, and it could help me, and now I want to connect it to something else.”"

"People I read a lot to my son were people like Robert Bly and Lucille Clifton, Frank O’Hara for some reason, Chinese poems, Japanese poems."

"it’s mysterious how these power structures unfold, isn’t it, and how we’re willing to accept them and allow them to prevail without questioning them."

"One of the reasons I don’t like the phrase “somebody passes away,” it’s so flimsy, it’s so vague, it sounds just like a wisp in the wind. No, they don’t, they die and then they stay in so many ways within us, around us in everything they loved. I just feel very, very strongly about that"

"I’ve always been very cognizant of voices in the air, although I don’t usually hear them as distinctly as I did with the “Kindness” poem, but without a doubt, I carry my father’s and I hear him all the time. For poets, I carry W.S. Merwin and William Stafford. Those were two of my favorite poets from my teenage years, whose voices live in me forever. I am such a grateful reader of their work. I had no idea that I would become personal friends with both of them. I feel very lucky to have known them. Also, so many women like Lucille Clifton, whom I valued her voice and her strength and her counsel, her mighty spirit. I feel like her voice is with me always. My Palestinian grandmother is with me, and even though we didn’t speak the same language, I feel that her perspective is with me. Those would be some of my main voices that I regularly listen to."

"just today, some students I was talking to in a Skype class in Kuwait — how much I love the modern world, that we can do these things."

"if you are a person in the habit of listening to yourself, to others, and then to your memory, then you may be more likely to hear other incredible things like a tree talk to you when you need a tree to talk to you, or the future give you a little bit of a direction. Maybe even you will hear a voice from your past giving you some guidance that you need right at that moment when you need it. I have felt that happen many times. I’m sure that it’s common that you suddenly hear the voice of your teacher from long ago. You haven’t even thought of that person in years, or seen them in many years, and suddenly, you hear something they used to suggest to their class and it comes back to you right when you needed it. There’s so much interesting listening that we can do. I think that kind of listening, it’s here to serve us, but also, we have to be ready for it."

"those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back - it's hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like...How do they maintain any shred of dignity and balance? You know those are the courageous people to me. All the-- simple people of the earth who-- don't lose their sanity in the face of-- constant-- disease in the world they live in. Who keep sending their children to school, who keep combing their children's hair. How do they do that? (2002)"

"I used to get in trouble a lot when I was a kid in elementary school for, well, what the teacher would call daydreaming. It was daydreaming, but I always felt that it was almost deeper. I remember wanting to respond and say something like, “Well, it’s not just daydreaming. I’m in a hypnotic trance, thinking about the blood inside my body right now, and all the different things it’s doing that I will never see"...that feeling of being transported by the miracle that we’re living inside of it every minute, and we often don’t even think about it."

"I think that is very important, not feeling separate from text — feeling your thoughts as text or the world as it passes through you as a kind of text; the story that you would be telling to yourself about the street even as you walk down it or as you drive down it; as you look out the window, the story you would be telling. It always seemed very much to me, as a child, that I was living in a poem — that my life was the poem."

"I do think that all of us think in poems. I think of a poem as being deeper than headline news. You know how they talk about breaking news all the time, that — if too much breaking news, trying to absorb all the breaking news, you start feeling really broken. And you need something that takes you to a place that's a little more timeless, that kind of gives you a place to stand to look out at all these things. Otherwise, you just feel assaulted by all of the tragedy in the world. (2012)"

"(BM: So "the fuel that feeds you" is the power of words?) NSN: I think so. The power of words, and a faith in the power of words. That words can give you something back if you trust them, and if you know that you're not trying to proclaim things all the time, but you're trying to discover things. (2002)"

"during the Gulf War, I remember two little third grade girls saying to me - after I read them some poems by writers in Iraq - 'You know, we never thought about there being children in Iraq before.' And I thought, 'Well those poems did their job, because now they'll think about everything a little bit differently.' They'll feel closer to that place in a different way. (2002)"

"I think I said this like 40 years ago in a poem — use a single word as an oar that could get you through the days, just by holding a word, thinking about it differently, and seeing how that word rubs against other words, how it interplays with other words. There’s a luxury in that kind of thinking about language and text, but it’s very basic, as well. It’s simple. It’s invisible. It doesn’t cost anything."

"If a teacher told me to revise, I thought that meant my writing was a broken-down car that needed to go to the repair shop. I felt insulted. I didn't realize the teacher was saying, 'Make it shine. It's worth it.' Now I see revision as a beautiful word of hope. It's a new vision of something. It means you don't have to be perfect the first time. What a relief! (2014)"

"The minute you place yourself above, what does that do to others?"

"In "Lunch in Nablus City Park," Naomi Shihab Nye asks, "Where do the souls of hills hide / when there is shooting in the valleys? / What makes a man with a gun seem bigger than a man with almonds?""

"I think many times the way immigrants — people look at immigrants with such a sense of diminishment, as if this person is less than I am because they’ve left their country. Well, I actually think they’re more than we are, because they’re braver. They’ve gone some other place. They have to operate in another language. How easy would that be? If I had to go to China today and start living in China and doing everything in Chinese, it would be very, very hard. So you think about the bravery of these people and the desperation with which they’re trying to find a realm of safety for their families and — just the basic safeties that we take for granted, every day we get up. And I don’t know; I don’t know how a world with so many resources and so many religious traditions and good hopes — how we can keep doing these things to one another in the world that create refugee populations. It just seems outrageous. Why is that happening so much?"

"something I’ve started saying over the past few years that helped me think about it is — I have so many Jewish friends, both in the United States and other countries, who would agree with this — but the idea that there could not be a sort of alliance between big power countries like the United States and Israel/Palestine that was more equivalent: Why do you have to have only one friend in the region? That’s like the dark side of junior high. In junior high, you learned that you could probably have two friends that are not exactly alike, and you might survive, and in fact, you’d be a much more interesting person. Why couldn’t the United States have two friends? Why couldn’t they ask better questions?"

"It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness."

"Since there is no place large enough to contain so much happiness, you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you into everything you touch. You are not responsible."

"(What attracted you to poetry?) That was a lifetime, instinctive connection. I loved the ways poetry worked on the page and in our brains. I loved the spaciousness about poetry—the space around the lines and room for your own thinking. I love the variety of voices. (2024)"

""You will need to be brave. There are hard days coming. There are hard words waiting in people’s mouths to be spoken. There are walls. You can’t break them. Just find doors in them." (p258)"