National Book Award Winners

"“It would make a good tourist attraction,” Mitchell said. Jara looked at him oddly, and for a moment he feared he’d said the wrong thing again. Then Jara laughed. “You Americans,” he said. “That is all you think about, your tourist attractions. You are the great spectators. The other countries of the world put on their shows for you, display their ruins, their pottery, their dances and religions. And you watch. You watch because your country has no past of its own. Is that right?” Mitchell shrugged. He had never really given it much thought. “But you are right,” Jara said. “It would make a good tourist attraction. That would be one way we could finance the excavation.” Ah ha, Mitchell thought. You laugh at the Americans, but when you need money for something we’re the first people you think of."

"Maybe art couldn’t survive it if was sponsored by the government. Maybe art always had to be subversive."

"Layla’s story, though not always accurate, was far more interesting than the truth."

"We are all tourists in each others’ lives. We all have monuments and ruins, places of strange beauty and forbidden sites chained off and locked securely so that no visitors can get in. And none of us has the guidebook to anyone else, or even the list of most commonly used phrases. We just have to get along the best we can."

"You think you know what your life will be like thirty years from now and suddenly you’re doing something you couldn’t have planned five minutes ago."

"I’ve got to live up to their expectations by acting irresponsibly again."

"“I can’t believe this,” Mary said, whispering urgently. “Every time I talk to you I think I’ve heard the worst, and then you come along and say something even stupider.”"

"Suddenly he didn’t care if the revolution were lost or won, only that it be over."

"“You can’t ask questions like that,” André said. “The unconscious has its own logic.” But he looked a little puzzled, a little too tied to the world of logic and order."

"“Lots of people would give anything to be in your place.” “I’m not lots of people,” Mary said. “I’m me. That’s what I’ll never forgive, that you did all this without even asking me.”"

"Claude sighed. “All right, you’re a poet,” he said. “I don’t understand why poets can’t make the effort to get along like everyone else.” “Ah,” Robert said. “But we poets can’t understand why everyone else is making the effort.”"

"She felt that she had seen beneath the mask of the world, and she could not quite believe in that mask again."

"“A novel?” André laughed. “The novel’s dead—don’t waste your time. The novel takes a small—oh, infinitely small—cut-and-dried section of so-called reality and calls it art. Your life is art. Don’t waste it trying to write a novel.”"

"You really can’t choose the people you’re going to like."

"A magician’s business is with words. He may use other things to help him along—amulets and so forth—but it is within words that the power lies. To choose the wrong words may mean death. And so magicians learn, from the first, to use as few words as possible, to answer as few questions as we can."

"She was already caught in the enchanted net of the bookshelves. She walks down rows of books about history, science, cooking, a large section devoted to car repair. Her feet on the linoleum floor, and the young man turning pages, made the only sounds in the store. It’s like drinking, Claire thought, delighted, running her fingers over the spines. Worse, because the spell lasts longer. If you read, don’t drive."

"You think you can be as heroic as he was, simply by dying. But he doesn’t take courage to die. That’s easy. It takes courage to live."

"He knew that there could never be an apology enormous enough for what he had just said. He didn’t care. He was tired of people who told him what state his soul was in, André and Antonin and a few of the others who took their cue from André. He had gone through something, something so strange that even now he was not sure what it meant, but he knew he was somehow stronger for it. He would not give that up to be a follower again."

"“Robert, how have you been? You look good. They’ve been telling me a fantastic story, I don’t believe a word of it…” Robert sat down at the table next to Paul and ordered grenadine. “It’s all true,” he said. “Every word of it, even the parts they made up.”"

"You are wrong, Rabbi. You did not kill your daughter. And it does not matter now if you could have done something to save her or not. To think about what might have happened is useless. You can think about what might have happened, turn it over and over in your mind until you can’t think of anything else. You can plan your revenge or—or suicide. But none of that can change the past. The dead—your daughter and my parents—they would want us to go on. To live."

"They passed a closed police station. Someone had written on the wall, “It is forbidden to forbid.”"

"Dear reader dearest inscrutable listener inscrutably harking or regrettably more likely not harking except in that chamber in me that posits you with me every moment I’m speaking or trying to speak"

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

"The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time."

"To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go."

"Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled — to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world."

"Death waits for me, I know it, around one corner or another. This doesn't amuse me. Neither does it frighten me. After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers. It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy. I walked slowly, and listened to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing."

"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."

"So every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God,one of which was you."

"And now I understand something so frightening, and wonderful — how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar."

"then you too are a dream which last night and the night before that and the years before that you were not."

"Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it."

"I don't know what God is. I don't know what death is.But I believe they have between them some fervent and necessary arrangement."

"But also I say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness."

"Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light."

"I don't want to end up simply having visited this world."

"Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death."

"What men build, in the name of security, is built of straw."

"You can have the other words — chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it."

"she always carries a notebook. That’s one of her trademarks. And she said to me, “If you don’t have a notebook, you don’t get it again. You have to write things down as they come to you.”"

"You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound."

"I am a performing artist; I perform admiration. Come with me, I want my poems to say. And do the same."

"As readers and writers, we find a certain home in books and language and literature — like I hear a Mary Oliver poem, and it’s as if I’ve been her neighbor, because I’ve read so many of her poems, even though I’ve never spent a day in her town."

"Am I not among the early risers and the long-distance walkers? Have I not stood, amazed, as I consider the perfection of the morning star above the peaks of the houses, and the crowns of the trees blue in the first light? Do I not see how the trees tremble, as though sheets of water flowed over them though it is only wind, that common thing, free to everyone, and everything?"

"What countries, what visitations, what pomp would satisfy me as thoroughly as Blackwater Woods on a sun-filled morning, or, equally, in the rain?"

"Poets—incredible nature poets like Mary Oliver, Gabriela Mistral, or Audre Lorde—look deeply at the world and make us feel like we are connected. Poetry that addresses the natural world helps us repair that connection. When you are paying attention to something, it’s a way of loving something. How can we continue to hurt something that we love?"

"Here is an amazement –– once I was twenty years old and in every motion of my body there was a delicious ease, and in every motion of the green earth there was a hint of paradise, and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same."

"Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?"

"Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable."

"Mary Oliver wanted to smell flowering pink bushes/and blossoming trees in Texas./Pull over, she said, at more than one corner. She/needed to absorb the scents./A city wasn't just a name./In her presence, babies might sing for the first time./She is like that."