Essayists From The United States

"Smilingly, out of my pain, I have woven a little song; You may take it away with you. I shall not sing it again."

"Deborah danced, when she was two, As buttercups and daffodils do; Spirited, frail, naïvely bold, Her hair a ruffled crest of gold."

"When people inquire I always just state: "I have four nice children and hope to have eight.""

"It would have been tragic if Leonard Feeney, the great apostle of salvation within the church, had died an excommunicate. ... There are certain texts from the Bible that I can never read without hearing, in my imagination, the voice and intonations of Leonard Feeney."

"The other day it was reported in the newspaper that a Maine hen had won a prize for having hatched nearly 200 pullets in the course of a single year. Now what ought the faithful youngster to remark on hearing that? He ought to remark that the hen deserved the Pulletser Prize."

"Though art be on vacation, The studio remains; The well of inspiration Is backing out of drains. Come, let us daub, my crazys, Surrealize the thrill Of soapsuds on the daisies And skylarks in the swill. Ours not to reason whether Surprise surpasseth wonder, When man hath joined together What God hath rent asunder."

"As good a pun as was ever spoken, to my memory, was made by a young English Jesuit now teaching at Wimbledon College. He met in a railway train a young man who said he was constructing a philosophy of his own. The young man declared that he set the foundation of his private philosophical system in the following epistemological principle: "I am, therefore I think!" "Oh," replied the young Jesuit, "isn't that putting Descartes before the horse?""

"Long before Zendaya was our biggest young movie star, before the Kardashians became an aesthetic and economic juggernaut and certainly before Barack Obama (let alone Kamala Harris) ascended the political ranks, the novelist Danzy Senna predicted we’d soon be living through what she called the Mulatto Millennium."

"Late in “Colored Television,” Jane returns to a passage by a (white) scholar whose study of mulattos influenced her doomed manuscript. “My life’s work has been to try to define a people that cannot be defined or even located — for the mulatto is the only race in our nation’s history that is perpetually shifting, changing colors, morphing into something unrecognizable,” the scholar writes."

"They put a hood upon his head And bound it with a thong. Then—England lost a ball of lead And Ireland lost a song."

"Novels are more like a marriage, stories more like affairs. A novel is something you live with for years and the characters in it become your second world, your second life. You think about them when you are not with them. You consider breaking up with them. You love them, you hate them. You fear them and avoid them and then run toward them and have a hard time extricating yourself from them. It’s such a whole body and mind experience that when it’s over and you are finally done, you experience real grief. Relief too, but also grief and a kind of identity crisis. You don’t know who you are without these characters to return to and wrestle with."

"With my first novel, when I was having such a hard time letting it go, I remember my brother saying to me, “It’s just a record of your creative mindset in a particular moment. You can’t drag it into the next moment. Let it be a record.” That was very helpful to me in terms of letting go – understanding there is no perfect version of the novel, there is only a time and place you wrote it as well as you could, reflecting your preoccupations, and then you move on."

"Motherhood is never honored by excessive talk about the heroics of pregnancy."

"I shall not be afraid any more, Either by night or day; What would it profit me to be afraid With you away? * * * For there is only sorrow in my heart; There is no room for fear. But how I wish I were afraid again, My dear, my dear!"

"Do you know a good way to convince ladies who adore he-men that you are a he-man and not a sissy? Raise a challenging mustache, write a humorless book full of unabridged hells and damns and kindred phrases in the field of sex, and then come out blatantly in favor of the Loyalists' cause in Spain."

"If I live till my fighting days are done I must fasten my armour on my eldest son."

"Here, Cyprian, is my jeweled looking-glass, My final gift to bind my final vow: I cannot see myself as I once was; I would not see myself as I am now."

"Jack Spink was fond of drink, His wife preferred to eat; For eats is eats and wets is wets And never the twain shall meet."

"Writing is so hard. It’s terrifying. And yet, when it goes well, it’s magical – better than any drug. You write for that fleeting moment when you get to see your Frankenstein creation come to life."

"One time, in Alexandria, in wicked Alexandria, Where nights were wild with revelry and life was but a game, There lived, so the report is, an adventuress and courtesan, The pride of Alexandria, and Thais was her name."

"People who believe in little laugh at little."

"Let us veil the tragic sequel, for a pious man but weak will Find, alas, that he's unequal to a lady's potent charms. So his long suppressed libido, sharp as steel of famed Toledo, Spurning prayers and hymns and credo, found surcease in Sadie's arms."

"I was making fun of the fact that the people with the least financial reward – the smallest piece of the pie – fight the most viciously amongst themselves. In other words, poets. There is no practical or market value to what poets do. It’s probably the purest form of writing in the artistic sense, but perhaps because of this, it’s the most ego-driven. Don’t get me wrong, I love poets, but there is a level of snark in that world that puts to shame any other genre. Novelists are second – almost as bad as poets about one another. I’ve never seen anyone get so much deep pleasure as a novelist reading a terrible review of another more successful novelist. Television is unlike poetry or fiction in that it’s a collaborative art. And because of this, amongst TV people there’s less viciousness on the surface. At least Jane [the protagonist of her novel Colored Television - Wikiquote] thinks so. But just beneath that smiling surface, there’s something maybe more dangerous."

"It is hard to believe that he chops nearly as much wood as he pretends to, or that cows, hens, and barnyards are his chief loves. He has been known to enjoy the tea life of social England and is at present a professor of poetry in a college."

"I think all serious artists at some point waver in their self-belief. But you also have to have those moments when you are deluded enough to believe that some crazy thing will work out. Even if it means returning to what you intended to do to begin with."

"For both of my parents, it was very clear to them we were going to identify as Black — in a city as racist as Boston, in a country as racist as America, that the identity in us that needed protecting and shoring up was our Black identity. It wasn’t the white side of us."

"I use the word mulatto a lot in my work, and I have sort of rejected the more politically correct term of "biracial" or "multiracial," mainly because it's meaningless and vague, and it could describe any two or three mixes that one could be. But mulatto — as problematic as the word is, and it comes out of slavery and the sort of pseudoscientific ideas of race, as problematic as it is — it's the only word that really describes this very specific experience of being Black and white and being that mixture in America, which is, singular, and I think an important distinction from the other mixes."

"I wrote a pilot for a show that was based on my work. I wrote an original pilot for a limited series that is still out there being shopped around. … What I felt writing scripts is, I really like it. It's very interesting and sort of technical-feeling compared to writing novels. And I will continue to do it because it's a nice break between books, and it kind of can pay … to get a new stove in your kitchen, like there's actual financial benefits to doing it. But I think my soul is in the page and in writing novels. Being in control of the entire universe that I'm writing is really what feeds me on a much deeper level. And so I will never kind of fully abandon the written word. It just feeds me in a whole other way, but unfortunately doesn't literally feed me or my children."

"I probably shouldn’t admit this, but writing for me sometimes begins in a spirit of revenge. I looked it up recently: the word revenge comes from the Anglo-French revengier, sharing lineage with vengeance, which originates from the Latin vindicāre, meaning “to assert a claim, claim as one’s own.” I write to lay claim. To claim the world as my own... Sometimes the spirit of revenge comes from a more personal, petty place. I want to tell how someone wronged me. But what I love about fiction is that nothing ends where it begins. In the writing, I am forced to identify with the person who wronged me and to look critically on the protagonist who was wronged. Through endless drafts, I’ve drifted so far away from the original story—so far from the spirit of revenge—that I find myself in a more tangled and interesting new place. So the real act of revenge is that I was able to make art out of the ashes of real pain. I’ve never been convinced that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But if you know how to make fiction out of lived experience—how to turn the “me” into a “she,” how to find the story that didn’t happen within the one that did—you don’t walk away from the calamity empty-handed. In a spin on the old Zen saying, the obstacle is not just the path but the muse itself. Or, in Nora Ephron’s words, “everything is copy.”"

"I think it’s always true for every writer that your debut novel stands on its own, but your second novel is always seen in relation to what came before."

"...To grapple with race is not at odds or separate from the craft of writing fiction."

"The only thing worse than him on the radio is all static."

"My mother had this book lying around our house in the 1980s called “The Big Book of Jewish Humor.” I remember looking through it as a kid and understanding that Jewish people had their own inside jokes, and this fact alone somehow made me feel that Jewish people were their own club, a tribe, with an inside and an outside."

"Good voyages are made both ways. A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with the wind. Even a head wind is better than nothing, No man ever worked his voyage any where, in a dead calm. The best wind for every thing, in the long run, is a side wind. If it blows right aft, how is he to get back? Let no man wax pale, therefore, because of opposition. Opposition is what he wants, and must have, to be good for any thing. Hardship is the native soil of manhood and self-reliance. He that cannot abide the storm, without flinching or quailing — strips himself in the sunshine, and lies down by the wayside, to be overlooked and forgotten. He who but braces himself to the struggle when the winds blow — gives up, when they have done, and falls asleep in the stillness that follows. Did you ever know any body stick to any kind of business, no matter how unpromising, ten years at most, who did not prosper? Not one! no matter how bad it might be at the beginning — if he stuck to it earnestly and faithfully, and tried no thing else — no matter how hard he may have found it sometimes to keep his head above water — still, if he persevered, he always came out bright in the end — didn't he?"

"… Mrs. Fisher herself believes that strolling is a lost art these days, but in fact she is the perfect rambler. A Considerable Town is one long ramble. It rambles through the city, its monuments, its quays, its shops and its cafes, but more important, it rambles through the author's mind and memory—she has known since 1932, and seems to have forgotten nothing. … Mrs. Fisher loves ships, s and s. She likes fresh fish with dry white local wine at lunchtime. She has a susceptible fondness for rogues and vagabonds, and a Dickensian taste for the scramble, the rasp, the blarney and even the petty pretensions of city life. Nobody can describe the sound of bells or the feel of churches better than Mrs. Fisher, and surely nobody in the history of has more exactly defined the pleasures of eating."

"I never set out to be a writer. I write compulsively. I am like a drug addict. I can't help it. I do what pleases me."

"... When I am alone and perhaps a little low, it is good to heat a can of and some milk or water, pour them into a warmed bowl with a sprinkle of in it, and go to bed with it."

"The first taste of bread, that day: chunks, chopped from loaves four feet long stacked at the end of the like skis, and it was the best bread I had ever eaten and I knew that forever, as of that noontime, I would be intolerant of the packaged puffy stuff called bread at home."

"Fortunately, good and premium wines are at the command of almost anyone in America who wants to drink them. Also, they are almost always dependable—a far cry from the old idea that "gentlemen" had their own s and their resultant giddy high life, and that the rest of the world lived on beer and s."

"I made this translation by myself, and can therefore thank none for it but perhaps my first teacher, who helped me learn to read. I have put it into the simplest words I know, since I feel that it is a singularly straightforward and unornamented piece of prose to have been written in a flowery literary period."

"We went away, away ... in this case to the , where we consumed s and s according to our natures, and as returned amateurs seemed to grow like water-flowers under the greening buds of the s, in the flowing tides of that street."

"WH Auden’s famous observation on the writer MFK Fisher – “I do not know of anyone in the States who writes better prose” – has been pressed into service on the cover of this reprint of Fisher’s most beloved book The Gastronomical Me (1943). The power of the puff lies in the fact that Auden wasn’t praising another poet or even a novelist but a food writer, a species conceived at that time as a domestic science teacher with a fail-safe recipe for . Implicit in Auden’s praise was the suggestion that Fisher should be removed from this category and set alongside Hemingway or Faulkner as a literary practitioner in her own right. These days we would get around the whole vexed business by saying that Fisher’s hybrid of culinary and memoir writing falls into the category of the personal essay, the kind of thing that has launched a thousand blogs and become a staple of the New Yorker’s annual food issue. The only hitch with this is that Fisher – or, to be formal, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher – was on record as hating the idea of the personal essay. To the proud daughter of a California newspaper man, the term signalled self-importance and, worse, over-writing. Fisher prided herself on never doing more than one draft which, if true, means she was a genius. Here she is on the food she encountered in Burgundy as a newlywed in the 1930s ..."

"Most of us, unhappily, shudder and ache and rumble as secretly as possible, seeming to feel disgrace in what is but one of the common phenomena of age: the general slowing of all physical processes. For years we hide or ignore our bodily protests and hasten our own dyspeptic doom by trying to eat and drink as we did when we were twenty. When we are past fifty, especially if we have kept up this pathetic pose of youth-at-table, we begin to grow fat. It is then that the blindest of us should beware. Unfortunately, however, we are too used to seeing other people turn heavy in their fifties: we accept paunches and s as a necessary part of growing old. Instead, we should realize this final protest of an overstuffed system, and ease our body's last years by lightening its burden. We should eat sparingly."

"We lived for almost three years in , which the s called without any quibble and with only half-hearted contradictions "the gastronomic capital of the world." ... ... We ate s of ten years old under their tight crusts of mildewed butter. We tied napkins under our chins and splashed in great odorous bowls of Écrevisses à la '. We addled our palates with s hung so long they fell from their hooks, to be roasted then on cushions of toast softened with the paste of their rotted innards and fine brandy. In village kitchens we ate hot with and snippets of salt pork in it."

"Food for the soul is a part of all religion, as ancient savages know when they roast a tiger's heart for their god, as Christians know when they partake of Body and Blood as the mystical feast of . That is why there can be an equal significance in a sumptuous banquet for five thousand heroes, with the king sitting on his iron throne and minstrels singing above the sound of gnawed bones and clinking cups, or in a piece of dry bread eaten alone by a man lifting his eyes unto the hills. That is why, to my mind, there can be nothing irreverent or illogical about putting together in one collection of feasts such apparently disparate things as St. Luke's story of the and Lewis Carroll's tea-part for , the and 's gluttonous orgy in decadent Rome."

"Who can blame Betty Fussell for wanting to get even? After reading My Kitchen Wars, I wonder only how she managed, for the more than 30 years that they were married, to direct her kitchen cleaver anywhere other than at ’s skull."

"Treating corn as a commodity is a part of our ingrained history — but it’s only two hundred years old. To people who aren't accustomed to thinking of history at all, that’s a long time. But to us here, it’s an eyeblink."

"In the past four years, I've branded on a ranch in , stalked in Texas, watched cows butchered by hand in a in Colorado, and toured a plant near that kills 6,000 cows per hour. I've attended conventions of the in and of a breakaway group in Denver, applauded lectures at the American Grass-Fed Society in Indiana and whooped it up at rodeos at the . I've talked with a New Jersey housewife investigating , with an ex-bull rider turned political activist, with an animal scientist who transformed . I went to Florida to see in the s, to to "Eeeeehaaaawwww" with the Cowgirls of the West in the Pioneer Days Parade. I even enrolled in Beef 101 at , in order to get some hands-on experience in how we turn cows into meat."

"I'd hit 40 by the time I began to write real words. By then I'd married a professional writer/teacher, typed and edited his manuscripts, raised two children, entertained like crazy, finished a doctorate in English Lit, taught Shakespeare, performed in community theaters, traveled as family all over Europe, lived in , London, and Provence. And along the way I found Julia Child and the pleasures of making at home in Princeton what we were eating in . Like Julia, I wanted to tell other people about it. Not through how-to technique but how food checks time. The way travel does. The way play-acting does."

"... food is life ... You don't have to cook. You do have to eat. Everybody has to eat. ... The basis of food is other people. ... You cannot raise everything you're going to eat. ... everything is culturally relevant to food."