Guggenheim Fellows

"I know now that these conquerors, like many others before them, and no doubt like others after, gave speeches not to voice the truth, but to create it. (p8)"

"A name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world. Losing it meant losing my ties to all those things too. (p5)"

"I believe in beautiful messes…I like to splatter a lot."

"They are standing up and they're crying…and their emotion is coming from all the emotion we're experiencing collectively."

"I think it’s one of the major responsibilities of the poet. As poets we tend to not like the word “responsibility”. We prefer “freedom”, we want to be as free as we can, but freedom and responsibility can go together. We’re responsible because we’re writers, and we’ve been at this all our lives…"

"Beauty, suffering, power and culture are all related. We cannot tear away from reality. It is better to live with all things, then to cut ourselves off and fester in a segmented mind."

"Poetry, with the breath of the poet, the heart of her life, joined by millions, pushes forth with the creative forces bestowed upon us. A wall is a plaything before the positive. It will take time. Change comes — rumbling with letters and caesuras, chants, odd-angled rhymes and earthy people power."

"The play is my gut's response to stories that have to do with my own bloodline. I think it is a great luxury and adventure to be able to dive into one's own history, one's own lineage, psychology and story, and illumine and at the same time fictionalize it."

"To me the play is never just the play but it’s the whole journey to it."

"To me, it’s always been a matter of: Do your homework and be committed to the extent that you can capture that world. I think I’m open."

"I don’t think anyone understands the Asian Americans’ place amidst this white and black culture. There’s something very specific to being Asian American that other peoples aren’t getting, and we haven’t learned how to define it, even amongst ourselves. We’re the Other. We’re always the Other, we can be here forever and we’re still foreign. We’ve impacted the culture, but third, fourth, fifth, sixth generations and still, you walk down the street and someone will look at you, and you will be foreign. That is what disturbs me."

"Oh, the stories—those are an amalgam. I don’t think she would’ve defined herself like that, but my mother was a great storyteller. She always held me captive. She smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes, and she’d always say, “Adrienne, I wanna tell you something.” She is just all over my whole writing career. And my father, because he gave speeches. Really, everything I write is a kind of mixture of his speeches, and her telling me all these stories about Georgia."

"It’s gone away from the thing that I hate, and now it’s more the thing that I don’t know how to do at all, or the thing that’s really hard to do…"

"But theatre is so dominated by men that no matter what kind of sheltered bubble you’re in, you’re going to encounter sexist bullshit. That’s just always going to be an issue…"

"When I’m making work, I’m very much thinking about how there’s a relationship between whatever the play is doing and whatever sort of automatic dismissive mechanisms people have for not wanting to deal with a particular issue. I think all of my plays have some sort of issue that they’re wrestling with that the audience normally doesn’t want to wrestle with. They want to be like, “I know what that is,” and not have to wrestle, because it’s a human instinct not to want to have to be challenged…"

"I like working with identities and stories outside of my own experience, so it’s kind of just a necessity…"

"The Vietnam War was raging at that particular time, so I wanted to do a positive play about a country character who was yearning for his home, as I was doing at Christmas…I drew on my experience growing up in the country - plowing mules, cropping tobacco, bootleggers, going to church. The rest was my imagination. I wanted to do something that could be performed on the streets - I love street theater. And I wanted my character to have a conscience."

"The world is always in a turmoil over skin color. The hatred that people feel, I’m not able to articulate it."

"I have to totally credit that to my mother. There were two children. I was the only girl. And she just always talked to me. She would tell me things that happened to her … her dreams, her past … it’s like the monologues in my plays, it really is. Because her stories were loaded with imagery and tragedy, darkness and sarcasm and humor…"

"To me, they’re the greatest generation. My parents and their friends, to me, have qualities that I don’t have, my children don’t have. They’re very imaginative, hardworking people. They created so much. My mother could teach all day, and then she could come home and cook a perfect dinner, and her house always looked perfect. They had qualities, I think, that are just so admirable."

"You gotta write women like… they can’t express ideas and attitudes that women of the feminist movement in the sixties made. Even though I’m aware of all that, you gotta be very careful if you’re trying to create a character like that, that they don’t come up with any greater understanding of themselves and their relationship to the world than women had at that time. As a matter of fact, all my characters are at the edge of that, they pushing them boundaries, they have more understanding. I had to cut back and say, “These are feminist ideas.” My mother was a feminist, though she wouldn’t express it that way. She don’t know nothing about no feminist woman and whatnot but she didn’t accept her place. She raised three daughters, and my sisters are the same way. So that’s where I get my women from. I grew up in a household with four women…"

"The real struggle has been since Africans first set foot on the continent, an affirmation of the value of one’s self. And I think if, in order to participate in American society, in order to accomplish some of the things which the black middle class has accomplished, if you have had to give up that self in order to accomplish that, then you are not making an affirmation of the value of the African being. You are saying that in order to do that I must become someone else, I must become like someone else…"

"Jazz in itself is not struggling…That is, the music itself is not struggling. It and the baseball history you talk about are two anchors of the African American cultural community. It’s the attitude that’s in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history."

"I think it was the ability of the theater to communicate ideas and extol virtues that drew me to it. And also I was, and remain, fascinated by the idea of an audience as a community of people who gather willingly to bear witness. A novelist writes a novel and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling."

"I would like to see a character make his stand on what he things [sic] about it because that way I think I can get into the humanness of people, and that’s really where my head is."

"I am more interested in how the human being approaches the issue instead of trying to write about the issue itself because we really know what the issues are in this life regardless of what we’re talking about…"

"First and foremost, I want to thank Prof. Anthony Yu, who promptly responded to my solicitation of opinions on my manuscript while he was on a lecture tour in Australia. Though by no means an acquaintance, he kindly accepted me as an “unregistered student” while he was also mentoring six dissertations at the University of Chicago as a retired professor. After a meticulous reading of the manuscript, he sent me detailed comments on each chapter, often on individual lines, sharing with me his deep erudition and vast knowledge of Chinese culture. Some of his comments were directly incorporated into this book. What moved me most is the fact that he composed his last batches of e-mail responses to my manuscript when he was seriously ill. I cannot but marvel at his humanitarian spirit and his dedication to scholarship."

"At a time when officials of particular nations on earth are vying to vaunt the ability of their leadership or the merit of incomparable power even in the looming shadow of catastrophic conflict, the wisdom of the DDJ seems ever more compelling and urgent."

"[Cao Xueqin] has succeeded in turning the concept of world and life as dream into a subtle but powerful theory of fiction that he uses constantly to confound his reader's sense of reality."

"For my students at the University of Chicago and in memoriam the Dead at Tiananmen Square June 4, 1989"

"A group which has a simple structure may offer difficult questions when operating as a transformation group. For example, the ways in which a cyclic group of order 2 can operate on a manifold, even on E 3, are far from completely known."

"Others have spoken and written about his solution of Hilbert's fifth problem, but perhaps not enough is said about his later work, especially his joint work with C. T. Yang. In a long series of papers written in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they used the study of group actions on homotopy 7-spheres to showcase and test the growing new techniques of differential topology, especially index theory and surgery theory. At a time when much work in topology consisted in building these machines, their papers demonstrated the beauty of applying this theory to unfurl complexities of symmetry and structure."

"THEOREM: if G is a locally euclidean, connected, simply connected topological group of dimension n greater than one, then G contains a closed proper subgroup of positive dimension."

"Flowing along independently of the problems and policy streams is the political stream, composed of such things as public mood, pressure group campaigns, election results, partisan or ideological distributions in Congress, and changes of administration."

"It seemed to me that we knew something about how issues were decided, but that we knew much less about how they got to be issues in the first place."

"The phrase "an idea whose time has come" captures a fundamental reality about an irresistible movement that sweeps over the politics and our society, pushing aside everything that might stand in its path."

"The agenda, as I conceive of it, is the list of subjects or problems to which government officials, and people outside of government closely associated with those officials, are paying some serious attention at any given time."

"Setting the agenda and getting one's way, however, are two very different things."

"One goal of a senator or representative is satisfying constituents. Publicity is essential, and one way to get publicity is to push for new policy initiatives."

"A fair body of scholarship has come to challenge the view that elected officials reign supreme."

"There is nothing automatic about campaign pledges finding their way into public policy."

"Public opinion may sometimes direct government to do something, but it more often constrains government from doing something."

"Ideas come from anywhere, actually, and the critical factor that explains the prominence of an item on the agenda is not its source, but instead the climate in government or the receptivity to ideas of a given type, regardless of source."

"People are sometimes reluctant to take big steps. Apprehensive about being unable to calculate the political fallout, politicians shy away from grand departures."

"Somehow, open heart surgery means more to most of us then the Alton, Illinois, Lock and Dam 26."

"The mere fact of being behind in "the greatest country on earth" is enough to constitute a problem for some people."

"Ideas become prominent and then fade."

"The chances for a problem to rise on the decision agenda are dramatically increased if a solution is attached."

"People in and around government sense a national mood."

"Consensus is built, sometimes very rapidly, by cutting in many and diverse interests."