autobiographers-from-the-united-states

"The Arkansawyers are of the type of the old Hoosiers, Crackers, Pikers, and the Big Smoky mountaineers. The Hoosiers themselves were descendants of the bond-servants of Colonial days and being of low degree sought their own kind while the great migration going "out West" moved along the Ohio. They settled in the malaria swamps of Indiana and Illinois, but that was on the highway to empire and civilization drove them out. They colonized again in Pike County, Missouri, and made the name "Piker" notorious throughout the West as denoting a fellow of feeble wit and feebler initiative. Other migrations of the bondservant stock found their way into Arkansas, and as no strong tribe followed them into this retreat they were never driven out again. "Crackers," descendants of the Georgia convict colony, also found refuge in Arkansas. The mountain people, too, came gradually onward, proliferating in their beloved highlands till they crossed the Mississippi and peopled the Ozarks. But these people are not mentally dull nor physically inefficient. They are simply a highland race that loves solitude and scorns comfort, literature, and luxury.These three strains, the mountain people, the Crackers, and the Piker numskulls, have united to make the Arkansas nation; for they are a nation, as distinct from the other peoples in America as is a Swede from a Dane. Whenever Arkansawyers appear in Kansas, California, South Carolina, or Texas the natives hold up their hands in horror, fearing that their Spartan State will be erased by the obliterating helot swarm. The high wages in the agricultural Northwest during the World War drew a few Arkansawyers to Nebraska, whither they took their dogs and women, their customs and ideals—and labored for the Swedish and Teutonic farmers. The sturdy Nebraskans (from North Europe) were shocked by the general worthlessness of the Arkansawyers and were heard to declare: "If they keep on letting that kind of people into this country, America has gone to hell.""

"On the front of my arm, I had a crusader cross inked in, I wanted everyone to know I was a Christian. I had it put in red, for blood. I hated the damned savages I’d been fighting. I always will. They’ve taken so much from me."

"Savage, despicable evil. That's what we were fighting in Iraq. That's why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy 'savages.' There really was no other way to describe what we encountered there."

"Nobody ever overcomes the phantasms of his childhood. The man is the corrupt dream of the child, and since there is only decay, and no time, what we call days and evenings are the false angels of our existence. There is nothing except sleep and the moon between the boy and the man; dogs dream and bay the moon, who is the mother of the unconscious. Sorrow and pleasure are the stuff of dreams and the energies of myriads of planets. What is the space between the boy and the man? Did the child who is now the man ever live? Did Christ exist and was Brutus at Philippi? The centuries that divide one from Jesus and Brutus contain no time. We still hear the tinkling of the sheep bells at Mamre, and Abraham continues to sleep beneath the terebinths just as Saul sits and broods underneath a tamarisk—but all these are "thoughts of the visions of the night.""

"When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels."

"Let the bard from Smyrna catalogue Harma, the ledges and caves of Thaca, the milk-fed damsels of Achaia, pigeon-flocked Thisbe or the woods of Onchestus, I sing of Oak, Walnut, Chesnut, Maple and Elm Streets."

"There are men that are birds, and their raiment is trembling feathers, for they show their souls to everyone and everything that is ungentle or untutored or evil or mockery is as a rude stone cast at them, and they suffer all day long, or as Paul remarks they are slain every moment."

"Bosch is great because what he imagines in color can be translated into justice."

"What most men desire is a virgin who is a whore."

"Nobody heard her tears; the heart is a fountain of weeping water which makes no noise in the world."

"When the image of her comes up on a sudden—just as my bad demons do—and I see again her dyed henna hair, the eyes dwarfed by the electric lights in the Star Lady Barber Shop, and the dear, broken wing of her mouth, and when I regard her wild tatters, I know that not even Solomon in his lilied raiment was so glorious as my mother in her rags. Selah."

"Woman is the most superstitious animal beneath the moon. When a woman has a premonition that Tuesday will be a disaster, to which a man pays no heed, he will very likely lose his fortune then. This is not meant to be an occult or mystic remark. The female body is a vessel, and the universe drops its secrets into her far more quickly than it communicates them to the male."

"The greater part of your misogamy is venal; the other cause of your invective humbug is that you're a muggish homuncle who couldn't raise a flickering ember in a vagabond-laced mutton."

"I didn't come in the Army to service any of them, I came in to nurse them."

"I was attending Keidan Elementary School and we would have ‘show and tell.’ I bought my car made out of clay and I would draw pictures of cars and such but it was my male teacher who told me that because I was a girl, I couldn’t design cars."

"From the time I was hired on Oct. 24, 1983 until I was let go in 2008, I was largely the only female car designer at the company. I was doing all this work but I was not getting promoted. I was watching Ford hire male designers and seeing them get promoted. They even started hiring female designers that were getting promoted before me,”"

"“If I’m on this project, I will make sure it is designed with women in mind. So all the features were catered to a more broad audience. It was still going to stay a muscle car but it’s just going to have more of a soft touch"

"It all started at the age of 11, introduced me to his coworkers and I noticed a set of blue doors. When I tried to open the door my dad told me I couldn’t go behind them because I wasn’t an employee and behind those doors were men and they were called ‘transportation designers. They designed every car that you saw going up the road."

"He didn’t know my father was my big mentor. He introduced me to this world and I was being mentored from all angles.”"

"“I knew I had to come up with something different. So I said, ‘Okay, I’m gonna start thinking about females and how they design things and take into account things women would want in a car."

"“I was so intrigued in hearing that, I decided that I wanted to become a car designer and I wanted to work at Ford designing cars"

"“Burn the Place” is divided into three parts, focussing on Regan’s childhood, her alcoholism, and her present-day recovery and restaurant ownership. The sections are constructed of scraps and vignettes, fragmentary pieces of memory that hop around the time line, following their own ordinal logic. Regan’s recollections are concrete and achingly precise—she is particularly attuned to scent, conjuring wafts of decaying oak leaves revealed under thawing snow, the earthy, fungal funk of a sourdough starter, the sharp tang of a metal key bearing a bump of cocaine—but they break and flow with a dreamlike disorientation."

"FISHERMEN AND HUNTERS WELCOME. MICHIGAN CHERRIES. SUGAR BEETS AND CORN. The banner at the truck stop rotated with these simple phrases. ... The seasons out here were determined by there was to fish, hunt, forage, pick, and so on, you understand. Most people were hunters and fishermen and animals were their prey, which left the flora to people like me. ... I liked truck stops. Sometimes I had cravings for that sort of meat and potatoes type of American cuisine you could find at a truck stop. Because I'm a fine-dining chef, people think I eat fancy most of the time. That is very far from the truth."

"My grandfather’s farm, 100 acres of corn fields, s, trees, ponds, abandoned cabins, sand, wild berries, and mushrooms, was nothing short of another universe full of magic. My dad’s father, George, was handsome and sweet. We drove up the side drive, past the house, and stopped just before the large barn and gate, which led back to the woods. The path to the woods was lined with wild and and sometimes if I was there on Sundays after the Lone Ranger episodes, I’d walk the trail and pick them into a small basket. Then I retreated back to the porch with the basket on my lap and ate every single one."

"Summers were everything because I didn't have school, and I hated school. I wasn't good at like some other kids. And there were a lot of kids at school. I liked to keep to myself, so things like school or anything that brought kids together made things sort of difficult. It was a people thing. In the summer, I kept track of time by what we foraged, like , s, , s, , , and by event's like Mom's birthday, the , my birthday, the county fair."

"The farmhouse was like a lot of farmhouses, I imagine. I was in love with that place. Everything about it was outrageously enchanting. It was in that house that I cooked my first s, gathered from my grandfather's farm. I stood on a footstool and stirred in the butter. My mom and I added salt and pepper. The earthy aroma filled my sense memory. I never forgot."

"Traveling around the country gave her new perspective and a break from her everyday life of running a restaurant, which she emphasized was a 24-hour job that required her to not only create a menu, but to do the bookkeeping, run payroll and manage the staff. Regan, who grew up on a 10-acre farm in Indiana, said it helped her realize that she wanted to bring food to a table and incorporate a lifestyle element in her projects. After months of searching, Regan found the location for Milkweed Inn in in the . It’s near the and is surrounded by lush woods on multiple acres with a river running through it."

"... As would do more than 30 years later, Palmer, a son of a golf pro at his hometown , almost single-handedly stimulated TV coverage of golf, widening the game's popularity among a ."

"I've made 20 aces in my lifetime, which doesn't sound like very many when you consider I've played golf since I was four years old, but the odds of making a hole-in-one are around 2,500-to-1 for a professional (and 25,000-to-1 for an amateur)."

"Maybe you'll fail most of the time, but until you've dared to try and have brought off an impossible shot from the or from the , or have salvaged a hole by laying a monster of a shot stiff against the pin, you will have missed golf's greatest playing thrill."

"I've always believed the is one of the greatest championships in the world. As a kid I read about and and other Americans who had won the British Open (or Open Championship, as they call it in Britain), and I remember the hero's welcome received after returning home with the in 1953."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"B is for Bachelors ... and the wonderful dinners they pull out of their cupboards with such dining aplomb and kitchen chaos. Their approach to gastronomy is basically sexual, since few of them under seventy-nine will bother to produce a good meal unless it is for a pretty woman."

"... 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."

"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."

"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."

"… 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."

"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 ..."

"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."

"But whether in the majority or the minority, young people will be growing up to find new values and activities different from their parents'. You may find that your meaning in life is so different because of your new experiences; you decide to break from your parents' demands. Each person must make his/her decision between his newly found values and his parents' established formula. Each must carefully strike a balance. Be considerate of your parents, for they nurtured you and think they know best. If you must break from them, do so as gently as you can."

"Today's critics are using their yardstick of today to judge a past they did not know."

"I believe that freedom must be accompanied by a sense of responsibility. If I can he considered famous because I have succeeded in my life goals, which were different from most other Chinese Americans, I achieved because of my unique combination : American freedom of choice, Chinese discipline in responsibility, my integrity, and willingness to work."

"I did pottery well because of the disciplined work habits instilled by my parents. Pottery as it was taught to me at that time required a student to know clay compositions , glaze chemistry and proportions of mineral oxides, the ability to throw pottery on the wheel, then trim and decorate it, the ability to apply glazes, to stack and unstack a kiln, the ability to tend to firing it to maturity-all this by myself."

"At Mills College, I felt favorable interest in me because I represented the Chinese culture to fellow students and my teachers. I also wrote about being informed upon graduation that there would be prejudice against employing me in the business world. And it was awareness of prejudice that motivated me to write my book. I feel that prejudice springs from ignorance. So I wrote Fifth Chinese Daughter as one personal effort to create understanding."

"My parents never complimented me; they never even said, "Thank you." If I reported any accomplishment to them, they would say disapprovingly, "If a flower is fragrant, people would naturally know it." Instead, I was constantly reminded to do my best to bring credit to my family and the name of "Wong". A disgraceful deed would downgrade my family, not just myself."

"For my whole life I had been bound by the tenets of Chinese culture. To be an artist was the option which would enable me ... to be free of Chinese culture’s relentless subjugation of women."