Women Academics From The United States

"Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is."

"If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be."

"I keep my mind on it. That's the whole trick, in so far as stage experience goes; keeping right there every second. If I think of anything else for a flash, I'm gone, done for. But at the same time, one can take things in — with another part of your brain, maybe. It's different from what you get in study, more practical and conclusive. There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm. You learn the delivery of a part only before an audience."

"When we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord."

"What was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself — life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?"

"The great pines stand at a considerable distance from each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks alone. They do not intrude upon each other. The Navajos are not much in the habit of giving or of asking help. Their language is not a communicative one, and they never attempt an interchange of personality in speech. Over their forests there is the same inexorable reserve. Each tree has its exalted power to bear."

"All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens."

"Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer."

"Nothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire."

"I tell you there is no such thing as creative hate!"

"We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it — for a little while."

"The years seemed to stretch before her like the land: spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning; the same pulling at the chain — until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released."

"There was about Alexandra something of the impervious calm of the fatalist, always disconcerting to very young people, who cannot feel that the heart lives at all unless it is still at the mercy of storms; unless its strings can scream to the touch of pain."

"I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do."

"Perhaps I am like Carrie Jensen, the sister of one of my hired men. She had never been out of the cornfields, and a few years ago she got despondent and said life was just the same thing over and over, and she didn't see the use of it. After she had tried to kill herself once or twice, her folks got worried and sent her over to Iowa to visit some relations. Ever since she's come back she's been perfectly cheerful, and she says she's contented to live and work in a world that's so big and interesting. She said that anything as big as the bridges over the Platte and the Missouri reconciled her. And it's what goes on in the world that reconciles me."

"There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years."

"Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him... We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder."

"She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring."

"There's nothing so dangerous as sitting still. You've only got one life, one youth, and you can let it slip through your fingers if you want to; nothing easier. Most people do that."

"Alexandra drew her shawl closer about her and stood leaning against the frame of the mill, looking at the stars which glittered so keenly through the frosty autumn air. She always loved to watch them, to think of their vastness and distance, and of their ordered march. It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them, she felt a sense of personal security."

"The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman."

"Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening."

"The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness."

"Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves."

"Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family — but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything."

"Directly under his feet was the French stronghold, — scattered spires and slated roofs flashing in the rich, autumnal sunlight; the little capital which was just then the subject of so much discussion in Europe, and the goal of so many fantastic dreams."

"My familiar spirit is like an old wild turkey that forsakes a feeding ground as soon as it sees tracks of people-especially if the people are readers, book-buyers. It's a crafty bird and it wants to go where there aint no readers That's the truth: they go and paw a place all up and spoil it for me. It isn't my secret anymore."

"He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the buffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story. This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed, — these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces, — and this would always be his."

"Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?"

"The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world."

"The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young."

"It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of."

"The world there was the flat world of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak; to the west, a corral that reached to the sunset; between, the conquests of peace, dearer-bought than those of war."

"The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world almost as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us."

"Jim Burden, the narrator of Willa Cather's My Ántonia, says of the Nebraska prairie to which he has moved from Virginia that "trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons." He adds, "It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious." Burden is speaking of the American frontier at the end of the nineteenth century, but his words ring true for a prairie dweller one hundred years later."

"From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas. (16 September 1902)"

"Do what you feel in your heart to be right — for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be "damned if you do, and damned if you don't.""

"I think of Eleanor Roosevelt as a woman of such human and uncompromising qualities that they make her not just in name but truly the first lady of the land."

"such courageous spirits as Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt."

"Part of my job in Noumea consisted in briefing frequent important visitors. One was Mrs. Roosevelt, who had tried unsuccessfully to visit us on Guadalcanal. She now turned up sporting a letter from the President to Halsey and me- she would go to the island provided we could take satisfactory security precautions, which we did. Eleanor Roosevelt was a remarkable woman, seemingly tireless during her frequent peregrinations. When Halsey and I met her in Noumea we proposed to take her to the Red Cross center where she could comfortably rest from her long flight. No, indeed- she insisted on going directly to the nearest hospital. She spent the bulk of her time in new Caledonia visiting our sick and wounded, talking to them by the hundreds. In each case she took the man's home address and upon her return to America wrote his family."

"She thought of herself as an ugly duckling, but she walked in beauty in the ghettos of the world, bringing with her the reminder of her beloved St. Francis, "It is in the giving that we receive." And wherever she walked beauty was forever there."

"I have lost more than a beloved friend. I have lost an inspiration. She would rather light candles than curse the darkness, and her glow has warmed the world."

"Besides giving me the most interesting job I could possibly imagine, the Women's Trade League brought many wonderful friends into my life. Among them were Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. I first met her when I was raising money for the League clubhouse. She called me her teacher, for she said I taught her all she knew about trade unionism. Always generous and understanding, she never refused me anything I asked for. This is quite a statement coming from me because, though I find it hard to ask for things for myself, I could ask for the moon if I needed it for the League. For twelve weeks during the depression, when we were having a hard time meeting our obligations, she shared her broadcasting fees with us. That $300 each week kept us going at a time when many of our supporters, hard-hit by the stock-market crash, could not help us."

"I buy 100 copies at a time of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was Eleanor Roosevelt's great work...I sometimes, if it's an adult audience, ask how many of them are familiar with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Most highly educated people have never read it. It's a tragic erasure of our heritage. It was such a time of hope. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes economic rights."

"Her real need to be of service overcame the hurt caused by her critics however, and she worked tirelessly all the years of Franklin's presidency. When he died she filled the void by working all the more. She had believed that When she was out of the White House there would he nothing more for her to do, "because she considered herself as an auxiliary to her husband and felt that her own value had been as First lady, not Eleanor Roosevelt. President Truman felt otherwise however, prevailing upon her to work for the newly formed United Nations. She spent the last years of her life travelling and working for the possibility of permanent world peace... she never stinted on her own time, energy, money, or compassion to help a stranger in need. Her greatness was in her kindness and empathy not, as her critics often pointed out, in her intellect ... She was given more tributes, medals and awards than any other woman in American history. Her books were translated into all major European languages, including Russian and Serbo Croatian, four Indian dialects and Hebrew, but in spite of all this Eleanor was not satisfied. She judged herself not on what she had accomplished, but what yet remained to be done, commenting that the knowledge of how little one can do alone had taught her humility. So she kept up her struggle against the injustices of the world."

"Eleanor Roosevelt, fine, precise, hand-worked like ivory. Her voice was almost attractive ... One had the impression of a lady who was finally becoming a woman, which is to say that she was just a little bitchy about it all; nice bitchy, charming, it had a touch of art to it, but it made one wonder if she were not now satisfying the last passion of them all, which was to become physically attractive, for she was better-looking than she had ever been."

"Eleanor Roosevelt came to New York City and I was in a, a contest, a debating contest, and I won the debate in the whole city of New York…I'll never forget this tall woman, her hair in a chignon, and this little porkpie hat on, and she was ugly. She was very ugly. But Eleanor, the moment she opened her mouth, you felt a warmth. It was beautiful."

"We know now, thanks to historian Blanche Weisen Cook, that Eleanor had a very complicated, intimate, most-probably sexual relationship with Lorena Hickok, who was a journalist. At one point, Eleanor moved her into the White House with her. And that Hickok's reporting upon Eleanor Roosevelt was integral to Eleanor Roosevelt's promotion of herself as a social reformer. Along with this, we do know that Eleanor Roosevelt had a wide, wide circle of female friends, many of whom were lesbians, many of whom were involved with social work. These women as an aggregate were called "Roosevelt's Brain Trust." And, in fact, Eleanor brought them to Washington and they were instrumental in forming the New Deal. Francis Perkins, one of Eleanor's intimate friends, was the first woman to head the Labor Department. So I think when we're looking at Eleanor Roosevelt's life, it's not just interesting that she had this affair with a woman-- she also apparently had an affair with her chauffer, named Earl Miller, as well, so Eleanor's life was complicated-- but what is really amazing that there is this circle of friends--which, again, Blanche Weisen Cook calls "female support networks"--that literally changed our very notions of how social work functions in American society and how reform functions. All again based upon lesbian--or women being intimate with women--relationships."

"I believe that women writers have not engaged or been allowed to participate in the discourse of official remembrance and that this is why their literature has been able to capture the frailty of the human spirit as well as its depth. Women writers who have contributed to the softness of remembrance can be traced from the early diary writings of young Anne Frank, to the visionary human rights declaration of Eleanor Roosevelt, and finally, to the powerful denouncing of apartheid by Nadine Gordimer."

"I am who I am today because of the choices I made yesterday."