Women Authors From The United States

"As a feminist, I want to involve readers in the story and give them time to pause, reflect, argue, and engage."

"I don’t like the term “political correctness” because conservatives tend to employ it to distract from serious racial, class, national, and gender discrimination. It’s a divisive phrase that perpetuates the so-called culture wars. I first heard the term in the 1970s, when it was used among progressive people as a safeguard against our own rigidness and the rigidness of other people on the left. Many political meetings ended with a period of evaluation and this was one of the problems acknowledged as something to avoid. The term has been bowdlerized since then. I welcome a range of opinions in my classroom and we always discuss the importance of genuine disagreement on the first day of term. I aim for a stimulating, surprising, awakening, collegial, and safe classroom, and try to foster this by encouraging everyone to speak and by creating assignments in which students work in a variety of small groups. We speak, we agree, we argue, we laugh, we learn."

"I’ve always regarded writing as a vocation more than a career. Vocation as in “calling,” as in “being summoned,” from the Latin vocare, which means “to call.”"

"Literature is the story of our many and diverse lives—in fiction, poetry, drama, and so forth. Unfortunately, women’s books are much less likely to get published then men’s books. They are much less likely to be reviewed then men’s books."

"My novels are usually ignited by a question–a philosophical, spiritual, moral, political quandary. My stories are usually imagined from a particular scene. Place is very important in all my fiction. (2021)"

"History shows that often artists first envision the change feminist activists seek to bring about."

"the literature that we read in the late sixties--I graduated from university in 1969--was really British literature by middle-class or upper-class white men. My people, working-class people, were not represented in the material I was reading."

"Whenas in perfume Julia went, Then, then, how sweet was the intent Of that inexorable scent."

"I think this American reflex judgment that if you write political fiction you are writing didactic fiction is funny because I see my fiction as the opposite. I see myself as somebody who is learning as I write, motivated, mostly, by questions. For me the process of writing a novel is to be thinking about the questions."

"One gender to walk the wide world in Is the feminine, A plight that — softly to a friend — I can recommend."

"The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes."

"Victor Hugo was a passionate observer, partial to death scenes. He had an appetite for extinction, a man sure to be on hand at the sound of a death rattle or the passing of a funeral procession."

"I had a perfect confidence, still unshaken, in books. If you read enough you would reach the point of no return. You would cross over and arrive on the safe side. There you would drink the strong waters and become addicted, perhaps demented — but a Reader."

"It seems an odd idea to my students that poetry, like all art, leads us away from itself, back to the world in which we live. It furnishes the vision. It shows with a sudden intense clarity what is already there."

"No matter what kind of verse a woman writes, nobody alive or dead deserves to be called a poetess."

"“Age is a quality of mind,” said Julia. “If years have left your dreams behind, if hope is cold, if you no longer look ahead, if your ambition’s fires are dead, then you are old.” “But if from life you take the best, if in life you keep the zest, if love you hold, no matter how the years go by, no matter how the birthdays fly, you are not old.”"

"... In such strange homes as the and the , or the deserts of Utah and southern California, we find the oddest desert plants, forced to curious expedients in order to sustain life amidst almost perpetual heat and , but often displaying blossoms of such brilliance and delicacy that they might well be envied by their more fortunate sisters, flourishing beside shady waterfalls, in a "happy valley" like , or a splendid mountain garden, such as spreads in many-colored parterres of bloom around the feet of . On the wind-swept plains hundreds of flowers are to be found; many kinds of hardy plants brighten the salty margins of the sea cliffs, or bloom at the edge of the snow on rocky mountain peaks, while quantities of humble, everyday flowers border our country roadsides or tint the hills and meadows with lavish color."

"It was a time when fashion was permitted to walk hand in hand with piety. All the fashionable accomplishments were taught by experts at . Fanny's contralto voice was well trained. She acquired enough Italian to read ',' a little Latin, even a little . Her Parisian accent soon became the envy of the other English girls ..."

"... the months that followed 's must have been dreary enough. Fortunately, his new book—the one thing that had made the last year bearable—still provided some distraction for his thoughts. had just been published by . There were reviews to be read, copies must be sent to old friends. He had taken great pains with the looks of his "bantling" and was satisfied."

"… her travels … became more frequent after she left the in 1974 to become a Washington-based syndicated columnist, with her work carried in more than 120 newspapers. She boldly ventured into many dangerous climes and into face-to-face encounters not only with Castro and a number of U.S. presidents, but also with such world leaders as Argentina’s , Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, Yasser Arafat and, in the first interview he granted to a Western journalist, Saddam Hussein when he was Iraq’s vice president in 1973."

"Like so many things, it all started with a small obsession. When I was only seven or eight, I used to lie in my comfortable old German bed at night, in every respect a most loved and blessed child, and think about it. What, I would wonder for reasons I have never totally understood, if only one person had the truth and that person was a woman? She would not voice it because the women I knew did not speak out, and so the world would be denied this crucial truth."

"Israeli officials will tell you privately that "If the Arabs were ever to win, we would use the atom bomb.""

"America the beautiful, Let me sing of thee; Burger King and Dairy Queen From sea to shining sea."

"I shall go smiling Into the great beyond, Looking upon the silence as release, Looking upon the darkness as a dream, Looking upon the deep unknown as rest."

"She stands, a guardian of the endless sea, Her garb is golden, and her lips are flame, She is the portal of Eternity And Beauty is the realm from whence she came! She is the voice of many bleeding lands— America, she calls! To Arms! Arise! For like a shimmering sabre in the skies In scarlet glow she stands A guardian of the earth and sea— Liberty!"

"You, Beloved, are the silvery lake shimmering in the desert of my youth."

"Bring me a languid woman, perfumed, young, Her dusky body hung with dazzling gems And strange, exotic iridescent stuffs — Her wanton eyes like thirsty summer moons."

"Bring me a pale flower-boy, White-limbed like a young heifer in a field, His lips a-quiver with unknown desire.... His soft throat virgin beneath my kiss, His bosom like a bower of stars."

"There is a little place in me That cries like any child, To be as forest things are, free, Lonely, and strange and wild!"

"All paths lead to you Where e'er I stray, You are the evening star At the end of day. All paths lead to you Hill-top or low, You are the white birch In the sun's glow. All paths lead to you Where e'er I roam. You are the lark-song Calling me home!"

"St. Brigid, please keep My babies asleep!"

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

"My heart shall keep the child I knew, When you are really gone from me, And spend its life remembering you As shells remember the lost sea."

"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!"

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

"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."

"I’m sorry you are wiser, I’m sorry you are taller; I liked you better foolish, And I liked you better smaller."

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

"There is a mirror in my room Less like a mirror than a tomb, There are so many ghosts that pass Across the surface of the glass."

"For life seems only a shuddering breath, A smothered, desperate cry, And things have a terrible permanence When people die."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."