Novelists From The United States

"“I don’t know what to say.” “Then say nothing, Pug. It makes you seem wise when everyone is babbling.”"

"The August sun beat down, baking, broiling, burning."

"One of things you have to have, if you're going to be a voice in this dilemma, is you have to have a core of knowledge, I guess, or a core of something. And my core is, historically speaking, there are no two sides to this history of the United States and its relationship to people who have lived here for thousands of years. There are no two sides to that story. You have no right to displace people, to steal their resources, and steal their lives. No human right, no human being has the right to do that to another human being. That's my core resistance. I don't do that to you or to you or to you. I very often go back to that. What directs a lot of my writing is: there are no two sides to this story. That's not very scholarly. It's not acceptable because there are two sides to everything, maybe this and maybe that. Part of the empirical evidence that history tells you is that for a while this was true and now that's true, and so on. That's the empirical evidence. That's not the evidence that I use. I say, there are no two sides to this story. What America has done is criminal. And they're still doing it. Sooner or later, a capitalistic democracy is going to be seen for what it is. It's simply not going to be sustainable."

"I like to use language to try to explain who I am and what I think of the world...That's the purpose of writing, to find out what you know in order to think."

"At the time when descendants of Goethe had begun their massive, secret march through Belgium, in those years before the United States entered World War I, there lived near Fort Pierre, South Dakota, one Joseph Shields, a fifty-year-old Sioux Indian who in his own way knew something of the rise of brutal doctrines, something of the destruction of ancient civilizations, something of a change of worlds."

"The dedication that is apparent in Ella Deloria's lifelong quest to preserve traditional Sioux language and culture was deeply rooted in her concern for the future of her people. She articulated this concern in relation to her own work in a letter written December 2, 1952, to H. E. Beebe, who provided her with funds to have the manuscript on social life typed for publication: "This may sound a little naïve, Mr. Beebe, but I actually feel that I have a mission: To make the Dakota people understandable, as human beings, to the white people who have to deal with them. I feel that one of the reasons for the lagging advancement of the Dakotas has been that those who came out among them to teach and preach, went on the assumption that the Dakotas had nothing, no rules of life, no social organization, no ideals. And so they tried to pour white culture into, as it were, a vacuum, and when that did not work out, because it was not a vacuum after all, they concluded that the Indians were impossible to change and train. What they should have done first, before daring to start their program, was to study everything possible of Dakota life, and see what made it go, in the old days, and what was still so deeply rooted that it could not be rudely displaced without some hurt. . I feel that I have this work cut out for me and if I do not make all I know available before I die, I will have failed by so much. But I am not morbid about it; quite cheerful in fact.""

"there certainly have been excellent storytellers and writers within anthropology. That’s one of the reasons I co-edited the book Women Writing Culture (1996) because I was really interested in finding the canon of women writers within anthropology who had written well. Anthropologists like Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, and Barbara Myerhoff, among others, have been amazing writers."

"Waterlily forms a valuable part of Deloria's legacy, the treasure trove of material preserving the Sioux past that she has bequeathed to us all, Indian and non-Indian alike. Today, fifty years after most of her interviews were recorded, we realize how irreplaceable those records are, and how fortunate we are that Ella Deloria devoted her life to their collection and translation. As more of her writings become published at long last, we can appreciate how splendidly she achieved her life's mission. For above all, Ella Deloria's work of transcription, translation, and cultural interpretation has provided the data and insight from which we can come to understand the Sioux people of the last century in the way that she intended, as fellow human beings."

"Mendoza was a little man; puny, you might say. But that was not the reason he took two Dilantin every day. Nor was it the reason that he carried with him quantities of multivitamins, which he ate like candy throughout the tedious days and sleepless nights. The puniness may have been the effect, rather than the cause. In any case, you noticed the smallness of the man right away. What you didn't notice at first was the other thing...the indefinable thing that made you forget about him as soon as he passed out of your field of vision. It was as though you saw him but that he wasn't really there amidst the bus passengers when you looked away, and it wasn't your eyes fell upon him later that he became real. That thing, whatever it was, Mendoza knew. And he tolerated it."

"All human progress was slow at the beginning, but at least it was cumulative as long as peoples could occasionally get in touch with each other."

"the truth is democracy has failed. In Indian Country, we've known it a long time. America hasn't come to that conclusion yet. But I'm not talking about the kind of democracy that has been imposed on Indian nations, which in itself is fairly criminal. When you put democracy in a broader sense, capitalist democracy is not going to proceed as it has in its exploitative way because it is not sustainable."

"Thus Dakota education was promoted: informally, through their ceaseless practice in human relations within the kinship circle; formally, in the teachings of the ceremonies, as well as in legends. Manual education - how to do this or do that-was the least of it. That simply came in the doing. Children were generally not given menial tasks to discourage them at the outset. They were given new materials to start on, so as to sustain their interest. Normal skill thus came in the actual doing. (7: Education)"

"All human beings learn from each other, we have been saying. The Indians, belonging to the great human family, have the same innate powers, inborn intelligence, and potentialities as the rest of mankind. They have imagination and inventiveness. They can copy what they see and adapt it to their own special needs. These are all common human traits."

"imagination and inventiveness are common human potentialities. All people invent."

"Anthropology has always been the handmaiden of colonialism all over the world. Not just here. Not just in Indian Country. Everywhere."

"All progress depends on contacts and the resulting exchange of new ideas."

"...myth, mythology, is the body of knowledge a people possess. That's not a very satisfactory explanation. But a myth is not a story. Mythology is the body of knowledge. It's usually expressed in symbols. One of the most important ones is language. Our mythology is embedded in our language. Okay? The way we express it, however, is kind of a literary thing. We express it through ceremony. We express it through, which is the way you say, "I am a Lakota." Or, "I am a Dakota." Or we express it in ritual, which is the way you talk to God. Or you express it in storytelling. Or you express it in dance, art, and music, and so on."

"I had this grandmother who said this to me earlier, "You don't even own your own life, my dear. You're only taking care of it for the next generation." That's fairly profound when you think about it. It is really what the Dakotas think about themselves and the world. It has, on the one hand, been their weakness because it's been exploited. But on the other hand, it is also their strength. It is what will make them, in the end, the winners in this conflagration. We're not protesting so much as we are saying: we have the right to our place in this universe. Maybe I'm the last generation of people who talks like that. The young people ought to think about it once in a while."

"A pedophile is a person with a sexual attraction to or predisposition toward children. That’s not Slade Wilson. If it was, I’d have written the character as a man struggling with those kinds of impulses. I didn’t write him that way because that’s not who the character is. Slade couldn’t stand Terra. He was only using her to help him kill the Titans. Which does not excuse his heinous behavior nor does it, I suppose, fully exempt him from the label. But labeling him a pedophile diminishes a very serious global threat to children by applying the term generically and often disparagingly as a dismissive aspersion rather than treat the term and condition with the gravity with which it must be considered."

"... by far the most active agent in the dissemination of both s and seeds is man. This is the frequent result of intention on his part, in the introduction and cultivation of new grains, fruits, and s, and he works to the same end unconsciously and often to his great detriment by the transportation of the s or seeds of pernicious weeds in the dirt clinging to s and s, and the mixture of impurities with his seeds through ignorance, carelessness, or unavoidable causes. This mode of , however, is purely artificial, and except in the case of a few weeds that have adjusted themselves to the conditions of cultivation, is not correlated with any special adaptations in the plants themselves, many of our most widely distributed weeds, such as the , the , and the , possessing very imperfect natural means of dispersal."

"The miserable, money loving wretches that these Yankees are: they even have the impudence to paint their advertisements of s and s upon the and the rocks that jut from the ."

"A very remarkable development of s takes place in the "" of Mexico and Florida, which begins life as a small , from seeds dropped by birds on the boughs or trunks of trees. When it gets well started, the young plant sends down enormous aërial roots, which find their way to the ground, and in time so completely envelop the host that it is literally strangled to death ... When this support is removed, the sheathing roots take its place and becomes to all intents and purposes the stem of the fig tree, which now leads an independent life."

"text at archive.org (See .)"

"There was hardly a fence left standing all the way from to . The fields were trampled down and the road was lined with carcasses of horses, hogs, and cattle that the invaders, unable either to consume or to carry away with them, had wantonly shot down to starve out the people and prevent them from making their crops. The stench in some places was unbearable; every few hundred yards we had to hold our noses or stop them with the cologne Mrs. Elzey had given us, and it proved a great boon. The dwellings that were standing all showed signs of pillage, and on every plantation we saw the charred remains of the and packing-screw, while here and there, lone chimney-stacks, " 's Sentinels," told of homes laid in ashes."

"That mess about judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin — that's some bullshit. Nobody has the right to judge anybody else. Period. If you ain't been in my skin, you ain't never gonna understand my character."

""Slavery is not the only story about black people. It’s only a small story! Don’t they know that if tomorrow a slave ship arrived at Elmina to carry us to America, so many Ghanaians would climb on board that this ship would sink to the bed of the ocean from our weight?" He laughed. I couldn’t help laughing myself. But who was the butt of the joke?"

"I have never known why women believe the things men tell them – or vice versa."

"Ah, how fortunate are those who have never learned the awful truth taught by hunger: that a man will do anything, to live one single day more!"

"“I am prepared for anything,” he said. I shook my head at his fatal arrogance. How can a man be prepared for anything?"

"Confession might be good for the soul, but if incautiously made public might be death to the body."

"Practise...what I call a decent mammalian philosophy."

"What is even a wise book but a blast from the lungs made visible to the eyes?"

"Southward, two mighty ranges of the Appalachians shouldered their way into the blue distance like tremendous caravans marching across eternity."

"Mornings, the flower-women hawk their wares— Bronze caryatids of a genial race, Bearing the bloom-heaped baskets on their heads."

"Between the villages of Aubière and Romagnat in the ancient Province of Auvergne there is an old road that comes suddenly over the top of a high hill. To stand south of this ridge looking up at the highway flowing over the skyline is to receive one of those irrefutable impressions from landscape which requires more than a philosopher to explain. In this case it is undoubtedly, for some reason, one of exalted expectation."

"Every new generation...is a fresh invasion of savages."

"He regarded all the country he was looking at as still a part of the United States, some of the inhabitants of which needed to be reconverted to the faith of their fathers—by apostolic blows and knocks if necessary."

"Local color has a fatal tendency to remain local; but it is also true that the universal often borders on the void."

"I lay there in the river for a minute and gave up. When you do that something dies inside."

"Legends are material to be moulded, and not facts to be recorded."

"Here the Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman all passed, leaving each his legend; and a brilliant and more or less feudal civilization with its aristocracy and slaves has departed with the economic system upon which it rested."

"Christ Jesus, when I come to die Grant me a clean, sweet, summer sky, Without the mad wind's panther cry. Send me a little garden breeze To gossip in magnolia trees; For I have heard, these fifty years, Confessions muttered at my ears, Till every mumble of the wind Is like tired voices that have sinned."

"Religions change; beer and wine remain."

"A victory for any side is a defeat for every side now."

"Yesterday, yesterday, yesterday—tapped the feet of the mare."

"Grow up as soon as you can. It pays. The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty, provided of course you are healthy and don’t die. No, the young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits."

"It is only men of genuine philosophical sense who can understand that the form of government is the most important thing in the world."

"Compassionate the mountains rise Dim with the wistful dimness of old eyes That, having looked on life time out of mind, Know that the simple gift of being kind Is greater than all the wisdom of the wise."

"It was good to be alive. Black Girl gathered herself under him and thundered down the Pike towards Lancaster. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow—was the tune her hoofs now seemed to be drumming on the road away from yesterday."

"Here lies a spendthrift who believed That only those who spend may keep; Who scattered seeds, yet never grieved Because a stranger came to reap."