Novelists From The United States

"Aref kept staring at the sleeping turtles on the beach as they climbed. Turtles weren't just cold-blooded reptiles. They were miracles. (p201)"

"When you drove out in the country, you felt closer to the earth than you felt in the city. You had better thoughts in the country. Your thoughts made falcon moves, dipping and rippling, swooping back into your brain to land. Maybe the motion of spinning wheels relaxed and enlivened them. Your thoughts weren't tied to one spot, and they weren't nervous, either. They were just open, and rolling. Maybe this was why some people decided to travel all of their lives, going to new places, not knowing what they would see next. (p211)"

"Aref kept thinking that no matter what you say, there is something more inside that you can't say. You talk around it in a circle, like stirring water with a stick, when ripples swirl out from the center. (p. 259)"

"Mystery remains part of many poems, as well it should, since it remains part of our lives no matter who or where we are."

"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."

"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."

"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)"

"There may be nothing more "basic" in education than gaining a sense of one's own voice. By acknowledging and shaping shared experience, we grow bigger. Poems help us see the world around us as rich material. And nothing is better than reading the work of our peers, as well as the work of older poets, to get us going in our particular terrain. A poem we love makes us want to write our own-hand to hand, map to map, contagious, delicious voices spinning us forward inside our cluttered, clattering lives."

"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."

"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?"

"I kept thinking, as did millions of other people, what can we do? Writers, believers in words, could not give up words when the going got rough. I found myself, as millions did, turning to poetry. But many of us have always turned to poetry. Why should it be any surprise that people find solace in the most intimate literary genre? Poetry slows us down, cherishes small details. A large disaster erases those details. We need poetry for nourishment and for noticing, for the way language and imagery reach comfortably into experience, holding and connecting it more successfully than any news channel we could name."

"I keep thinking, we teach children to use language to solve their disputes. We teach them not to hit and fight and bite. Then look what adults do!"

"Sometimes it works to fight logic with logic and craziness with craziness. This truth, however, cannot be depended on."

"I keep feeling so much gratitude for what we are given in our lives. All of us, by way of accident, by way of things we couldn't have selected ourselves. The worlds we are born into, the people we are related to, the landscapes we learn to love wherever we are."

"Suheila commented that people argued most where there was least to talk about. If conversation was rich and subjects many, talk kept rolling fluidly, passing over rough spots like water over rocks. But once everything had been said, you started paddling backwards, flinging water and scraping your knees."

"I hope you feel as I do that it wouldn't be that hard for the United States to have two friends. You know, to have only one good friend seems like the dark side of junior high school. Every time President Obama or any president says, "Israel, you are our enduring friend forever," I think, Okay that's fine, but couldn't you have two friends? What about, "Palestine, you are our friend too." Why not?"

"Here at home, the night belonged to the moon. Electricity was rationed, three hours each evening."

"I have always thought about how stupid and boring violence seems in this world where we could just listen to more stories instead, right? We could ask people who trouble us, Could you tell me your story? Usually I have found when you ask someone to do that, you end up feeling closer to them, even if their story in no way mirrors yours. Find a better thing to do."

"It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in."

"Today you will say things you can predict and other things you could never imagine this minute. Don't reject them, let them come through when they're ready, don't think you can plan it all out..."

"There is nothing wrong with the richness of the fantasy life. I am convinced of that: it is always so much more rewarding than reality."

"As a man of average size and limited physical prowess, I have long ago learned that insanity is far more intimidating than size of strength. Nobody, if you will, fucks with a crazy man."

"I’ve learned pogroms do not require much in the way of organization. Merely ample hate."

"Please understand, Schisms occur within subcommunities frequently and with relative ease. Mergings of subcommunities, on the other hand, are more like comet sightings… very rare indeed."

"Instead of gathering the lost Sparks of holiness and restoring the unity of mankind and the world, the whole point of our existence has become an ever more rigid purification, a sifting out of dissenting views, the banishment of anything which threatens to challenge our customs and ingrained ways of thinking, or which makes us uncomfortable or uncertain—"

"“The wall will always be there to protect us,” they said. I later came to understand that it is merely a tangible, universally visible symbol of the far more important invisible walls separating the seventy-thousand subcommunities—or is it eighty-thousand now? One day, I firmly believe, there will be as many subcommunities as there are residents in the City."

"“That’s…that’s a nightmarish scenario. Do you really think people would just… attack one another, as soon as the fences were gone? That they’d throw aside civil society so easily?” “What ‘civil society,” Leah? Your eight million inhabitants have never learned how to exist and thrive in a civil society—all they’ve known are clans, sheltered clans.”"

"And so he nattered on, like an old woman fretting over the fraying of her prayer rug, not realizing the ceaseless nervous fidgeting of her fingers was the cause of its fraying."

"William Shakespeare has one of his characters propose, Let’s kill all the lawyers. He forgot to include the bureaucrats."

"Psychologists claim the mind is incapable of imagining itself not existing, of mentally inhabiting its own extinction. Yet I can sense obliteration’s lackeys nibbling away at my edges, hungry mice eating the brown crusts of the bread of my being."

"Would it be riding the wave, or stepping over a puddle?"

"People will believe what they want most to believe, what they yearn to be true. Nothing is more readily accepted than the seeming confirmation of an already established prejudice."

"Bureaucracies are dullards’ tools of revenge on men of action. Sputtering machines filled with blinkered human cogs, they respond glacially to signals issued by their political masters, rather like ponderous dinosaurs whose tiny brains required an auxiliary neural center within the hip region to re-transmit commands all the way to their tail."

"Thanks to my work, I know the type all too well. A malcontent, a refusenik. A grievance monger, quick as a scampering lemur to take offense. Such people make little sense to me."

"What the world thought made little difference. Rembrandt had to paint. Whether he painted well or badly didn’t matter; painting was the stuff that held him together as a man. The chief value of art, Vincent, lies in the expression it gives to the artist. Rembrandt fulfilled what he knew to be his life purpose; that justified him. Even if his work had been worthless, he would have been a thousand times more successful than if he had put down his desire and become the richest merchant in Amsterdam."

"In Viagens Interplanetarias, Sprague’s interstellar travel takes place in Earth's backyard, so to speak; among stars, that is, within a reasonable number of light-years from the sun. Further, his concept of interstellar travel has . This makes the stories harder to write. I once asked him why he did this and he explained that since travel faster than the speed of light was impossible, it would take far too long to reach the really distant stars. I pointed out that if he used “hyper-space” as most writers did, that wouldn’t matter. (Hyperspace is a mythical term among s.f. writers and can be used in a vague and foggy way to excuse any speeds up to infinity.) Sprague said he didn't believe in hyperspace. I said neither did I but I used it. He just put his pipe in his mouth and shook his head. "If I don’t believe a thing is possible," he said, "I don't use it.""

"“Obeying its natural instincts, it would have snapped up a tasty citizen or two. Then nought would have dissuaded your thick-skulled military from slaying the beast, as if one mountain dragon were not worth a score of human beings. Thorolf raised his eyebrows. “How reckon you that?” “The mountain dragon is an endangered species, whereas the world swarms with humanity. Man is in no danger of extermination, unless it destroy itself any devilish novel weapons like those Serican thunder tubes I hear of. It would serve the species right.” Thorolf gave a quiet laugh. “I never thought of it thus. Doubtless being human has warped my thinking.”"

"“I have met Master Parthenius,” growled Thorolf. “He is the sort to whom, if he were drowning, I should be happy to throw an anvil.”"

"Some are true gentlemen everywhere; the problem is to pick them out of the mass."

"Certes, if we hanged everyone with a murderer in’s pedigree, not enough would survive to bury the bodies!"

"Titled wenches make chancy wives, being full of hoity-toity snobbery. They fancy themselves beings of a superior species by virtue of blue blood, when ’tis well known that most noble houses were founded by successful banditti who frightened some weakling ruler into granting titles."

"For aught I know, he may have told that silly tale so oft that he’s come to believe it himself."

"“We are a law abiding folk, sir. We do not permit private persons to indulge their feuds on their own, and we have some most ingenious penalties for homicide.” “Mean ye,” said Jillo, “that amongst you Pathenians, a gentleman may not avenge an insult by the gage of battle?” “Of course not! We are not bloodthirsty barbarians.” “Ye mean there are no true gentlemen amongst you,” sniffed Jillo."

"“Ah! Here we be! ‘Human beings most readily love others of their species who, alpha, do services for them; beta, flatter them; gamma, refrain from reproaching them for errors; and delta, cultivate good nature and ease of manner.’”"

"A grudge makes a starveling diet."

"All supernaturalism is simply a scheme to enable a class of magicians called priests to live without working."

"If the gods made man, which I doubt, they should have made him so he sometimes enjoyed what he has instead of forever yearning for what he has not."

"Gontran was a rancorous, vengeful man, who never forgave what he deemed a slight or let bygones be bygones. Hatred and grudges so filled his mind as to render him impervious to reason."