Women Authors From The United States

"What is beautiful is right: what is unbeautiful is wrong."

"It is our imagination, not our conscience, which makes us better than the beasts of the field."

"... entertainment for entertainment's sake is the most expensive form of death ..."

"Talking to you...is only thinking to myself—made easier."

"If the gods have no sense of humour they must weep a great deal."

"All forced virtue is degrading in its effect."

"A quart of doubt to an ounce of truth is the safest brew."

"Faults! I adore faults! I can never find too many in any creature."

"All is vanity,...discovering it—the greatest vanity."

"To die for one's great ideas is glorious—and easy. The horror is to outlive them. That is our worst capability."

"Dearest, every man—even the most cynical—has one enthusiasm—he is earnest about some one thing; the all-round trifler does not exist. If there is a skeleton—there is also an idol in the cupboard!"

"A man's way of loving is so different from a woman's," sighed Anna. "There ain't nothing," said Mrs. Grimmage, "there ain't nothing that makes them so sulky and turns them against you so soon as saying anything like that."

"... there was never a woman so ill-suited to public life as I am. I have had to whip myself, as it were, into society, and the loneliness of it all has been terrific."

"Reader. But where are the Unities? Author. In life there are no Unities, but three Incomprehensibles: Destiny, Man, and Woman."

"He longed to make a mark, or, to express it more vulgarly, cut a figure. Now, fortunately or unfortunately, the number of figures which can be cut in the world is practically unlimited; the only difficulty is to cut precisely the kind of figure one would wish."

"There is no misery quite so wearing as the misery of a false position. It seems to slay the body and the soul."

"We must know the measure of a man's desires before we can sound the depth of his regrets."

"People get to like a soul, but a satisfactory hat makes an impression at first sight."

"A statesman's words, like butcher's meat, should be well weighed."

"He did not speak again till just before he died, when he kissed his wife’s hand with singular tenderness and called her "Elizabeth." She had been christened Augusta Frederica; but then, as the doctors explained, dying men often make these mistakes."

"Men astonish themselves far more than they astonish their friends."

""Ah," said that gentleman, ever ready to discuss one friend with another—in fact, it was chiefly for this pleasure that he made them..."

"... he fell a too ready victim to circumstances: he helped to build the altar for his own sacrifice."

"Ideals, my dear Golightly, are the root of every evil. When a man forgets his ideals he may hope for happiness, but not till then."

"... love comes to man through his senses—to woman through her imagination."

"Men heap together the mistakes of their lives and create a monster which they call Destiny."

"I am distressed that some people believe that enforced ignorance about our country’s past is a virtue. As historians, we aim to provide an accurate view of the past, even if that includes topics that are uncomfortable or upsetting to us now. Any effort to eliminate or ignore certain aspects of history does our students a disservice. The profits wrung from the labor of enslaved peoples helped to make the United States a prosperous nation — or rather, a prosperous nation for a few."

"Q. What do you value most about the history profession? A. It seems to me that the profession has avoided the bitter in-fighting over methodology that has wracked other disciplines over the last few decades. I think historians are welcoming of different kinds of methodologies and different topics of study. And I think we pretty much agree among ourselves that we know good history when we see it."

"...Even white abolitionists and other reformers were indifferent to the plight of Black workers who could not find decent jobs. That disconnect — between a rhetoric of equality and a reality of prejudice — characterized not only mid-19th century Boston, but to some extent certainly the history of the United States in general."

"I have seen first-hand the corrosive effects of the notion that the study of the humanities in general and history in particular is less valuable to undergraduates than the study of science, math, and engineering. In fact, an understanding of history is a critical component of citizenship—for citizens of the United States, and citizens of the world."

"I grew up in a village of 500 people in Delaware in the 1950s, and attended a segregated elementary school. At an early age I wondered why the black students who lived near my school did not attend it."

"I worry that the impulses driven by anti-intellectualism and anti-science play such a major part in shaping our political landscape today."

"Q. Who are some of the most overlooked individuals or groups in U.S. history? A. People of modest means. Many of these families were resourceful and resilient. For a variety of reasons, no matter how hard they worked, they found it difficult to own their own land or homes. Their stories are inspiring, and also illuminating, as we are reminded of the vulnerability of certain groups of people, especially people of color, in accumulating assets over the generations. Discrimination in employment, housing, bank loans, education and health care are some of the factors that have affected these families. Many privileged Americans seem oblivious to these facts, and want to believe that merit alone is the deciding factor in whether or not individuals prosper. To a great extent today, we are our zip codes; in other words, where we live helps to determine access to quality public education, health care, and police and fire protection. Impoverished communities and families do not enjoy a “level playing field” in their striving for a better life."

"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."

"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've spent most of my life doing kitchen battle, feeding others and myself, torn between the desire to escape and the impulse to entrench myself further. When social revolutions hustled women out of the kitchen and into the boardroom, I seemed to be caught in flagrante, with a pot holder in my hand. I knew that the position of women like myself was of strategic importance in the war between the sexes. But if you could stand the heat, did you have to get out of the kitchen? For even as I chafed at kitchen confinement, cooking had begun its long conquest of me. Food had infiltrated my heart, seduced my brain, and ravished my senses. Peeling the layers of an onion, spooning out the marrow of a beef bone, laying bare the skeleton of a salmon were acts very like the act of sex, ecstatically fusing body and mind."

"... I found that Oklahoma was the only place in the country where you could go to the and the on the same day. Of course this is the only place in the country that even has a Cowboy or Indian Hall of Fame. It is also the only place in the country that has a town named ."

"We ought to have a discourse of love that we enact and practice in all of our spaces and in the work that we do. Not exclusively with children and young adults, but with each other."

"I guess am a poet because I love to reframe complicated ideas into prose and poems that grab at heartstrings."

"A little over a decade ago, the major players in the environmental movement tried to take on . The industry's fertilizers were polluting the , and the environmentalists asked Florida voters to approve a penny-per-pound tax on sugar companies that would yield $35 million a year for cleanup work. But "Big Sugar" responded with a multimillion-dollar campaign to portray the environmentalists as white elitists attempting to weaken an industry that employed blacks and Latinos. Jesse Jackson joined forces with the industry, telling Floridians, "We should never have a showdown between alligators and people." With the help of minority group blocs, voters soundly rejected the tax. The defeat was a wake-up call for the , and other large environmental groups, which at the time were staffed and supported mostly by white people. In recent years, these organizations have begun to devote a great deal of money and effort to engage minority groups—not just to foster a sense of inclusiveness, but to survive in a demographically changing society. Nonwhite people make up 33 percent of the U.S. population, and the expects that figure to increase to 50 percent by 2042. Meanwhile, a survey of 60 environmental groups conducted in 2002 found that minorities made up less than 13 percent of their staffs."

"Last month, the , in conjunction with several conservation organizations, released a State of the Birds report, an assessment of the health of the country’s 800 bird species. The findings were mixed. On the one hand, nearly one-third of our birds face the possibility of extinction, have suffered a serious population decline or are in danger of such a decline. On the other hand, many of the species that were in trouble several decades ago, such as the and dozens of wetland birds, are now thriving precisely because our conservation efforts have paid off."

", in some ways, is like a religion. Some people get hooked on birds gradually, but many other have an experience like Phoebe's, an awakening triggered by a "spark bird." Many religious people seek to transcend the everyday by praying or meditating; birders seek transcendence by spending time in nature. Bird clubs give them a sort of church, a community of like-minded people who offer companionship and support."

"… It used to be that if you liked birds, you shot them. In any case, that's what gentlemen in England did after the country start to industrialize, in the early nineteenth century. Cities were getting big and polluted, and people were longing to reconnect with nature. The rich, who had lots of free time, began going to the woods to collect plants, bugs, and rocks. If you were a man, you might also collect birds—bloodily, with your shotgun. Once you'd shot a bird, you’d figure out what it was, then skin, stuff, mount, and display it. The idea was to amass as big and varied a collection of bird skins as possible. A few decades later, when the United States started industrializing, took hold among the upper class here."

"... once you've identified a bird, you can appreciate it on a deeper level. If you know you're looking at a Blackburnian Warbler, for instance, you also know that it spends most of the year somewhere between Peru and Panama, usually at about two thousand meters above sea level; that it subsists, for the most part, on s and beetles; that every April, it flies north across the and settles for the summer somewhere between Georgia and Saskatchewan, where it looks for a mate and builds a nest, often in a high branch in a ; and that the female lays three to five white eggs with little reddish blotches that hatch around early June."

"The banning of DDT and other toxic pesticides also has led to the recovery of the and the in recent decades, according to the report. Over the same period, s, which give hunters and bird watchers a year’s access to National Wildlife Refuges for $15, have generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, nearly all of which has gone to expanding wetland refuges. As a result, wetland bird populations have increased by nearly 60% since 1968, the report found. Species that have made particularly impressive recoveries include the , and ."

"... Phoebe married a few days after she graduated, became a housewife in the Minneapolis suburbs, and had four children in quick succession ... She tried being a teacher and a leader, but didn't take to either. Then, one sunny spring morning when she was thirty-four, when only one of her kids had started school and the youngest two were still in diapers, an neighbor took her out birdwatching. As she beheld the blazing orange throat of a that was perched in the top of a tree, she had an epiphany akin to a religious awakening."

"... Phoebe crisscrossed the globe with ever-deepening abandon, staking out rare and spectacular birds in the wildest places on earth. She still took tours, but she took increasingly fringe ones, and as time went on she took more trips on her own, hiring local guides to show her around. She slept in s, at truck stops, and by the side of the road; she traveled in tiny planes, in canoes, and on horseback. Once, she was chased by tribesmen with ten-foot-long spears; another time, she was boat wrecked in the middle of the ocean. On the island of , she was carjacked, kidnapped, and brutally assaulted by five thugs. Ten years after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, Phoebe had become obsessed with the notion of seeing eight thousand species, more than any other birder in history. She had also lost the capacity to take into account her family, her health, and her safety."