Essayists From The United States

"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."

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

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

"That mess about judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin — that's some bullshit. Nobody has the right to judge anybody else. Period. If you ain't been in my skin, you ain't never gonna understand my character."

""Slavery is not the only story about black people. It’s only a small story! Don’t they know that if tomorrow a slave ship arrived at Elmina to carry us to America, so many Ghanaians would climb on board that this ship would sink to the bed of the ocean from our weight?" He laughed. I couldn’t help laughing myself. But who was the butt of the joke?"

"The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn."

"The missionaries were vortices of force thrown out in advance by the force to the eastward that was making west. They thought that they came to bring Christ but in thinking so they were deceived. They were agents of a historical energy and what they brought was the United States. The Indians had no chance. If it looked like religion it was nevertheless Manifest Destiny."

"No one will ever tell in full the heroism or the stupidity of the foreign missions, the holiness-saturated devotion of the missionaries or their invincible foolishness. There were only two agencies for the extension of civilization on a large scale, armies and missions, and in the light of history the primitives who drew the armies were much the better off. The missionary was a man glad to submerge self in a holy cause but, except in a minority so small it does not count, his dedication locked him away from reality so completely that at this distance he seems crazed if not crazy. The heathen were not people to him: they were souls."

"History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance."

"The route led through the enchanted chaos of the Arizona deserts, a country mostly of naked rock in mesas, peaks, and gashed canyons, painted tremendous colors with brushes of comet’s hair. Frequently it was a giant-cactus country — saguaro by designers of modern decoration, cholla by medieval torturers — or a country of yuccas and the yucca’s weirdest form, the Joshua tree. Sometimes it was even a grass country. And through most of the route it was a country where occasionally you could find the characteristic oasis of the Southwest, a little, hidden arroyo with something of a stream in it, choked with cottonwoods, green plants blooming only a rifle shot from desolation."

"The nation had had two symbols of solitude, the forest and the prairies; now it had a third, the mountains."

"Mr. Lincoln was telling his countrymen that the achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire, and he was telling them that Yesterday must not be permitted to Balkanize it."

"Hetæræ accompany the fine arts in association with quick money. They came to Virginia as soon as the true value of the Comstock was perceived. They constituted, no doubt, a deplorable source of gambling, pleasure and embroilment. They were not soft-spoken women, their desire was not visibly separable from the main chance, and they would have beheld Mr. Harte’s portrayal of them at Poker Flat with ribald mirth. But let them have a moment of respect. They civilized the Comstock. They drove through its streets reclining in laquered broughams, displaying to male eyes fashions as close to Paris as any then current in New York. They were, in brick houses hung with tapestries, a glamour and a romance, after the superheated caverns of the mines. They enforced a code of behavior: one might be a hard-rock man outside their curtains but in their presence one was punctilious or one was hustled away. They brought Parisian cooking to the sagebrush of Sun Mountain and they taught the West to distinguish between tarantula juice and the bouquet of wines. An elegy for their passing. The West has neglected to mention them in bronze and its genealogies avoid comment on their marriages, conspicuous or obscure, but it owes them a here acknowledged debt for civilization."

"The common man fled westward. A thirsty land swallowed him insatiably. There is no comprehending the frenzy of the American folk-migration. God’s gadfly had stung us mad."

"California was almost entirely dream, a dream vague but deep in the minds of a westering people."

"Between the amateur and the professional, ... there is a difference not only in degree but in kind. The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different integration, a different nervous and muscular and psychological organization. ... A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom."

"Don't have much to do with people who drink sherry at any time except with soup; there's something wrong with them."

"We are a pious people but a proud one too, aware of a noble lineage and a great inheritance. Let us candidly admit that there are shameful blemishes on the American past, of which by far the worst is rum. Nevertheless, we have improved man's lot and enriched his civilization with rye, bourbon and the Martini cocktail. In all history has any other nation done so much?"

"Orange bitters make a good astringent for the face. Never put them in anything that is to be drunk."

"Sure the people are stupid: the human race is stupid. Sure Congress is an inefficient instrument of government. But the people are not stupid enough to abandon representative government for any other kind, including government by the guy who knows."

"This is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affections glow and valor is reborn, when the shadows deepen along the edge of the forest and we believe that, if we watch carefully, at any moment we may see the unicorn."

"That other supreme American gift to world culture, the martini cocktail, will do only at its own hour — when darkness begins to fall from the wings of night and the heart cries out for a swift healing."

"Remember always that the three abominations are: (1) rum, (2) any other sweet drink, and (3) any mixed drink except one made of gin and dry vermouth in the ratio I have given."

"When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day's occupation that is known as the cocktail hour."

"Our friend alcohol was given us of the gods to make us see for a while that we are more nearly men and women, more nearly kind and gentle and generous, pleasanter and stronger, than without its vision there is any evidence we are."

"You can no more keep a martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth, and one of the shortest-lived. The fragile tie of ecstasy is broken in a few minutes, and thereafter there can be no remarriage."

"The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act."

"The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole."

"The rat stops gnawing in the wood, the walls withdraw, the weight is lifted, the specters fade. Nerve-ends that stuck through your skin like bristles when you blotted the last line on your manuscript or closed the office door behind you have withdrawn into their sheaths, your pulse slows, your heart lifts. The day was not so bad as it seemed, the season has not been so bad, maybe there is sense or even promise in going on."

"Nothing can be done with people who put olives in martinis, presumably because in some desolate childhood hour someone refused them a dill pickle and so they go through life lusting for the taste of brine."

"In the South, a lady’s opinions could not be more important than a drawing-room charade, an accompaniment to sillabubs and cobbler."

"Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey."

"Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerves give to wisdom."

"Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate."

"New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan, while the American empire careens onward toward its unpredicted end. ... It is the first American section to be finished, to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America."

"No one can say fully what sublimity means, or how the awe or terror or exaltation inspired by the earth in torment affects him; but everyone, even the shallowest sightseer, the strident and aggressive woman in purple rayon slacks shouldering others aside to look at the Great White Throne, is enlarged by the experience. The sightseer may lack vocabulary, even concept, to speak of the one in the many, eternity moving through forms of change, the flowing away at once of time and earth, but there remain mystery and the fulfillment of identity, and he will be richer than he was. It is the same with aesthetics: one may lack words to express the impact of beauty but no one who has felt it remains untouched. It is renewal, enlargement, intensification. The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizen."

"The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. When you reach the line which marks that drop — for convenience the one hundredth meridian — you have reached the West."

"The migration was under way. ... Its great days were just around the turn of spring — and an April restlessness, a stirring in the blood, a wind from beyond the oak openings, spoke of the prairies, the great desert, and the western sea."

"Biography seemed to be no more than a high-spirited game of yanking out shirttails and setting fire to them."

"On the isle of Pago Pago, land of palm trees, rice and sago, Where the Chinaman and Dago dwell with natives dusky hued, Lived a dissolute and shady, bold adventuress named Sadie, Sadie Thompson was the lady, and the life she lived was lewd."

"Let us veil the tragic sequel, for a pious man but weak will Find, alas, that he's unequal to a lady's potent charms. So his long suppressed libido, sharp as steel of famed Toledo, Spurning prayers and hymns and credo, found surcease in Sadie's arms."

"If a man builds a better mousetrap than his neighbor, the world will not only beat a path to his door, it will make newsreels of him and his wife in beach pajamas, it will discuss his diet and his health, it will publish heart-throb stories of his love life, it will publicize him, analyze him, photograph him, and make his life thoroughly miserable by feeding to the palpitant public intimate details of things that are none of its damned business."

"But here's our friend José, who seizes her bridle. A wild homicidal glint gleams in his eye. He's mad and disgusted and cries out, "You've busted the heart that once trusted you. Wed me, or die!" Though Carmen is frightened at how this scene might end, I'm forced to admit she is game to the last. She says to him "Banish the notion and vanish! Vamos! which is Spanish for "run away fast." A scream and a struggle! She reels and she staggers, for Don José's dagger's plunged deep in her breast. No more will she flirt in her old way, that's certain. So ring down the curtain, poor Carmen's at rest."

"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."

"For both of my parents, it was very clear to them we were going to identify as Black — in a city as racist as Boston, in a country as racist as America, that the identity in us that needed protecting and shoring up was our Black identity. It wasn’t the white side of us."

"Jack Spink was fond of drink, His wife preferred to eat; For eats is eats and wets is wets And never the twain shall meet."

"One time, in Alexandria, in wicked Alexandria, Where nights were wild with revelry and life was but a game, There lived, so the report is, an adventuress and courtesan, The pride of Alexandria, and Thais was her name."

"In Spain, where the courtly Castilian hidalgo twangs lightly each night his romantic guitar, Where the castanets clink on the gay piazetta, and strains of fandangoes are heard from afar, There lived, I am told, a bold hussy named Carmen, a pampered young vamp full of devil and guile. Cigarette and cigar men were smitten with Carmen; from near and from far men were caught with her smile."

"...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."