Women Authors From The United States

"Mr. Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box. There was a story that the present box had been made with some pieces of the box that had preceded it, the one that had been constructed when the first people settled down to make a village here. Every year, after the lottery, Mr. Summers began talking again about a new box, but every year the subject was allowed to fade off without anything's being done. The black box grew shabbier each year: by now it was no longer completely black but splintered badly along one side to show the original wood color, and in some places faded or stained."

"The children assembled first, of course. School was recently over for the summer, and the feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them; they tended to gather together quietly for a while before they broke into boisterous play."

"Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children."

"Cocoa? Cocoa! Damn miserable puny stuff, fit for kittens and unwashed boys. Did Shakespeare drink cocoa?"

"Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives."

""...I am a Muslim woman, yes I think myself as a Muslim, whether or not I believe in Islam. I did not choose to be a Muslim but it is not within my power to make myself anything else. Each one of us whoever she is persuaded to be in her early years. Each one of us has fallen into the trap set for him in childhood and rest of his life is no more than bitter struggle either to stay in that trap or leave it. Decision to stay or go is yours alone, and life challenges every one of us no matter what we do. If you decide to stay, life will present you with challenges which will drag you out of it, and if you decide to leave it will challenge you to remain. Staying is a challenge leaving is a challenge. One's freedom lies in your decision to stay or go."

"Please, please, don't let your civilized way of thinking interfere with your defending your great country. Please, please defend your values. Please defend your freedom. Defend the heaven you are living in. Don't take anything for granted. I don't. I enjoy every single moment of my American life. Just walking down the street by myself, without being accused of being a whore is a bless for me. Just chatting with my next door male neighbor, without being accused of committing adultry is a bless for me. Having a cup of coffee at Starbucks by myself is a bless for me. Please! Please, don't take anything for granted. Please defend this beautiful country! My dream is to see my country, Syria as free as America – not the other way around."

"You need to understand that Islam is the problem. I am sick and tired of people here in the West asking me to soften my message. I am sick and tired of people asking me, "Are you trying to change 1.3 billion people?" Yes, I am trying!"

"Islam has never been misunderstood. Islam is the problem. But no one is stating the truth. No one is taking a hard look at the root of terrorism which is the brain washing machine called Islam. Islam is not up to me, is not up to any Muslim – man or woman. Islam is exactly what the prophet Muhammad did and said. In order to understand Islam you have to read the biography of Muhammad. It is very traumatising. It is very shocking. He married his second wife when she was six years old. He was over fifty. [...] His third wife was Sophia. She was a Jewish woman. It was well documented, well written in our school books that he attacked her tribe. He killed her father, her brother, and her husband. At the same day, he slept with her. That's what I call Islam."

"I receive death threats on a daily basis. I'm a well-known writer in the Arab world. My writings expose me to millions of devout Muslims who have nothing positive to prove but the sheer cruelty of their teachings. Islam has deprived them of their intellectual ability to face criticism with an effective and acceptable way."

"The trouble with Islam is deeply rooted in its teachings. Islam is not only a religion. Islam (is) also a political ideology that preaches violence and applies its agenda by force."

"Brother, you can believe in stones, as long as you don’t throw them at me. You are free to worship whoever you want, but other people’s beliefs are not your concern, whether they believe that the Messiah is God, son of Mary, or that Satan is God, son of Mary. Let people have their beliefs."

"Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them."

"We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people."

"Decades, if not centuries are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits [for democracy]. In Britain, the road [to democratic government] took seven centuries to traverse."

"Traditional autocrats leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other re- sources which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos. They do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations. Because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable to ordinary people who, growing up in the society, learn to cope, as children born to untouchables in India acquire the skills and attitudes necessary for survival in the miserable roles they are destined to fill."

"The speed with which armies collapse, bureaucracies abdicate, and social structures dissolve once the autocrat is removed frequently surprises American Policy makers."

"Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world’s policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world’s midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war."

"No idea holds greater sway in the minds of educated Americans that the belief that it is possible to democratize governments anytime and anywhere under any circumstances ."

"The right to free speech./Jeanne Kirkpatrick walks out when students hiss./She has the right to free speech/any time/anywhere/because she defends/U.S. imperialism./But Merle Woo?/Merle Woo gets fired/from the classroom./She speaks about democracy./For students, staff and faculty. Against censorship./For a Third World College. Against cultural genocide./For lesbians and gays. Against heterosexism./For the possibility of all our voices,/in all languages, singing out."

"Jean Kirkpatrick [is] the chief sadist-in-residence of the Reagan Administration"

"Russia is playing chess, while we are playing Monopoly. The only question is whether they will checkmate us before we bankrupt them."

"Neither nature, experience, nor probability informs these lists of "entitlements", which are subject to no constraints except those of the mind and appetite of their authors."

"When Marxist dictators shoot their way into power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don't blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies. They blame United States policies of 100 years ago. But then they always blame America first."

"Americans need to face the truth about themselves, no matter how pleasant it is."

"When our Marines, sent to Lebanon on a multinational peacekeeping mission with the consent of the United States Congress, were murdered in their sleep, the "blame America first crowd" didn't blame the terrorists who murdered the Marines, they blamed the United States. But then, they always blame America first. ... The American people know better."

"And now, the American people, proud of our country, proud of our freedom, proud of ourselves, will reject the San Francisco Democrats and send Ronald Reagan back to the White House."

"The rose has told In one simplicity. That never life Relinquishes a bloom But to bestow An ancient confidence."

"I remember that Bob had bought several books during the trip, and they were in sight. One was a collection of verse by a talented child named Nathalia Crane, then making a sizable splash in the American literary world."

"Some of the critics explained the work by insisting that the child was some sort of medium, an instrument unaware of what was played upon it; others, considering the book a hoax, scorned the fact that any child could have written verses so smooth in execution and so remarkable in spiritual overtones. … The appeal of such lines is not that they have been written by a child but by a poet."

"Nathalia can explain practically every line she has ever written; I have heard her uncertain treble clarify passages that have puzzled erudite authors. No poet that ever lived delighted in amassing such curious, half-forgotten sounds; not even Francis Thompson had so great a vocabulary of rare and archaic terms. . . Nathalia collects words the way a boy of her age collects postage stamps; she had thumbed Noah Webster's work (in various editions) and made a glossary of her own. The dictionary is her playbox and she knows exactly where every odd toy is concealed."

"Nathalia sort of sings her poems to herself — they come into being that way. She reads Kipling constantly, and Conan Doyle is her favorite. The only poet she likes is Longfellow, but she doesn't enthuse over him. She likes wild, imaginative tales. When she finds a word she likes or doesn't understand, she looks it up in every available dictionary and studies every possible meaning and use for it..."

"It seems impossible to me that a girl so immature could have written these poems. They are beyond the powers of a girl of twelve. The sophisticated viewpoint of sex … knowledge of history and archeology found in these pages place them beyond the reach of any juvenile mind."

"A year ago, to a startled public, was revealed the most extraordinary prodigy of them all — Nathalia Crane, 11-year-old poet, "The Baby Browning of Brooklyn," whose first volume of verse, The Janitor's Boy, was heralded by critics to be a work of genius. Such words as "blastoderm", "sindoc," "peris," "parasang," "sarcenet," "teazel," "nullah," "cantatrice," "barracan," "sistrum," writhed and hissed in her verses. One poem began with the nebular hypothesis and ended with prohibition; others cantered with a Eugene Fieldian humor; still others coldly glowed with the passion-weary detachment of a woman who has had her fill of life and its motley follies. Critic-Poet Louis Untermeyer chortled with elation. Poet William Rose Benét wrote a preface. The English Society of Authors and Playwrights (of which Thomas Hardy is President) asked Nathalia Crane to join them."

"Let go the lure The striving to unmake;Behold the truth Whenever heart may ache There is a glory In a great mistake."

"And the eyes of all look upward seeing sign-word drawing nigh, The stony wings of Egypt coming back across the sky;We hear the clinking tamborine of Miriam anew; We believe in every miracle since Lindbergh flew the blue — The wonder of the long draw when the bowstring is a thread — The beauty of a courage that can raise the wings of lead."

"A single-motored miracle, a lead mine on each flank; Below a shadow swept and awed the hundred-fathom bank."

"A thousand ardent oilers swung the long spout 'twixt their nods, And tried to glimpse a meaning in the challenge of the gods.And then one night there landed on a Mineola swale A plane that looked like pewter, with a carrier of mail.Its wings were tinged like tea-box skins, each truss of shadow gray, Its cabin but an alcove slung beneath a metal ray. The Spirit of St. Louis was inscribed upon the lee; It came from out a province that had never seen the sea."

"The gods released a vision on a world forespent and dull; They sent it as a challenge by the sea hawk and the gull.It roused the Norman eagerness, the Albion cliffs turned red: "You fly the wings of logic — can you fly the wings of lead?"

"Great is the rose That challenges the crypt, And quotes milleniums Against the grave."

"Great is the rose Infected by the tomb, Yet burgeoning Indifferent to death."

"He found the harem filled with rocking maids Surrendered to the orgies of the sob."

"Oh, we have had great lovers that we followed to the pyre; Our boasts out-do the Sabine girls—the Mosque of St. Sophia. And we are very sure of ours, for when a city falls, They seize us and they love us and they hurl us from the walls."

"Treating the sword blade the same as the staff, Turning the chariot wheel into chaff. Toppling a pillar and nudging a wall, Building a sand pile to counter each fall. Yielding to nothing — not even the rose, The dust has its reasons wherever it goes."

"The world is growing gentle, But few know what she owes To the understanding lily And the judgment of the rose."

"Said the tiger to the lily, Said the viper to the rose, Let us marry so our children May attain the double pose.With a feline half a flower — With the attar in the asp We could institute a slaughter That would make a planet gasp."

"You cannot choose your battlefield, God does that for you; But you can plant a standard Where a standard never flew. 11px|frameless QOTD 2007·11·01 Sound file"

"Across the downs a hummingbird Came dipping through the bowers, He pivoted on emptiness To scrutinize the flowers."

"Cloud-made mountains towered, Beckoning to me; Visionary triremes Talked about the sea..."

"The very serpents bite their tails; the bees forget to sting, For a language so celestial setteth up a wondering.And the touch of absent mindedness is more than any line, Since direction counts for nothing when the gods set up a sign."