Short Story Writers From The United States

"Haven’t you stopped to wonder why men want a scapegoat? What is it, what was it ever, but a device to help them avoid looking at themselves?"

"I already knew that Max’s type of messianic enterprise is a gold mine. The legions of the lonely, the mentally and emotionally starved, the bewildered and resentful, the angry daydreamers—who of them wouldn’t chip in five or ten dollars to buy a substitute for God, or Mom, or Big Brother, or the New Jerusalem?"

"You never meet anything mean or cruel in music. I’d like to be able to play Bach before they they blow up the world. I’d like to be at the keyboard when they do it."

"After three and a half centuries I have found, for an empirical ethics, no better starting axiom than this: cruelty and evil are virtually synonyms. Human ethical teachers have insisted over the ages that a cruel act is an evil act, and men on the whole endorse the doctrine no matter how repeatedly they violate it. There is inevitable revulsion against any blatant attempt to make cruelty a law of behavior."

"Yet good is the drink, evil only a poison that is sometimes in the dregs: in the course of living we are likely to shake the glass—no fault of the wine. It is good to sit quiet in the sun: there is no nicely balanced opposing evil to that. Where is there any matching evil to a hearing of the G Minor Fugue? As absurd as asking, What is the opposite of a tree?"

"If there must be blame, then all citizens—you, I, everyone—are responsible for letting it be that kind of world, for not placing ethical development ahead of every other kind. We understand ethical necessities quite well; we’ve been capable of understanding them for several thousand years; but we haven’t been willing to let them rule our actions—it’s that simple."

"“I wonder,” said Abraham, “if I’d ever think I knew enough to act.” “If you don’t, then study all your life and talk a little when you believe you have something to say.”"

"Human beings have never been very adult about cleaning up after themselves."

"Namir would know all the uses of scandal and innuendo and half-truths. Strange weapons, so easy to take up, the stain indelible on user and victim."

"I notice men themselves have never invented a god capable of understanding them."

"“You have to fight back. Can’t afford not to, with your intelligence. People hate intelligence, didn’t you know?” “Depends on what it does to ’em, doesn’t it?” “Not so much, Angelo. Dream up a new gadget, they’ll be grateful for a while,” said Feuermann’s voice. “It’ll be only the gadget they love, not the brain that made it—that they fear. They may have enough superstitious dread to worship it—devil-worship—but never will they respect it except superstitiously.”"

"A justifiable expense, Drozma, if only to let Angelo discover the woods—at any rate I have been in most of the temples and cathedrals of the world, and the peace I sometimes found in them was never more than a small substitute for what there is under the arches of the leaves."

"In intelligent life, human or Martian, maybe there has always been a genuine division between those who honor the individuality of others and those who are driven to control and pervert it."

"In politics, wishful thinking just gives the wolves a license to howl."

"One doesn’t look for the small promises of an ethical revolution in the headlines: the ocean’s currents do not derive from the ocean’s tempests."

"They never seemed to want to teach her anything except how to be like everybody else. When she finished—bright, you know, nothing stupid about Clara—she could add a column of figures after a fashion, read a little if she had to. Hated books, still does. Always been a heavy reader myself, be lost nowadays if I wasn’t. Damned if I know what she did learn. Self-expression before she could have anything to express. Social consciousness, whatever that is, when even now she hasn’t enough command of language to tell you what she thinks society is. Scraps of this and that, no logic to hold ’em together. Everything made easy—and how are you going to make education easy? You might as well try to build an athlete by keeping him in a hammock with cream puffs and beer."

"One would think that the mere shortness of life would be a reminder that to destroy beauty is to destroy one’s own self too."

"I’ve watched human beings fool around with love. Love of self mostly, but also love of place, work, ideas; love of friends, of male and female, parent and child. I can’t think of any human illusions more comic than those of love."

"Maybe the schools have come to regard education as a sort of by-product, something it would be nice to have if it isn’t too much trouble."

"“And where is your guarantee against war in that, Miles?” “There can’t be any except in human ethical maturity. A sensible political structure would help enormously, but there’s going to be risk of war so long as men think they can justify hating strangers and grabbing for power. Human hearts and minds are basic—the rest is mechanics.”"

"“Faith,” she said gently. “But, Will darling, I just never have seen any of the mountains they say it moved.”"

"Patience is a narcotic for the weak."

"They measure rank as Mussolini did, by the amount of carpet between door and desk."

"we are here after Joyce, and Joyce was very daring, very creative. Now we must all be very daring, and do what we want with the language we use."

"Being oneself is truly living. Gandhiji said, "If I don't live the truth, I am and will never be free." And being free is the essence of expressing oneself and Being. This is Moksha-Dharma and Moksha-that is what I am interested in. Dharma is the honesty of oneself with oneself."

"“I am a man of silence. And words emerge from that silence with light, of light, and light is sacred. One wonders that there is the word at all ‐Sabda-‐and one asks oneself, where did it come from? How does it arise? I have asked this question for many, many years. I’ve asked it of linguists, I’ve asked it of poets, I’ve asked it of scholars. The word seems to come first as an impulsion from the nowhere, and then as a prehension, and it becomes less and less esoteric – – till it begins to be concrete. And the concrete becoming ever more earthy, and the earthy communicated, as the common word, alas, seems to possess least of that original light. The writer or the poet is he who seeks back the common word to its origin of silence that the manifested word become light. […] Thus the word coming of light is seen eventually by light. That is, every word-image is seen by light, and that is its meaning. Therefore the effort of the writer, if he’s sincere, is to forget himself in the process and go back to the light from which words come. Go back where? Those who read or those who hear must reach back to their own light. And that light I think is prayer.”"

"England and America are industrialized societies and therefore have a very superficial culture, what do they call it, a "horizontal" culture. They have lost touch with themselves, that is with a deeper, spiritual dimension. It is only out of this deeper experience that great literature arises...It is hard to be truly spiritual in a country like England today. Except Kathleene Raine, who writes authentic poetry in England today?"

"“We cannot write like the English. We should not. We can write only as Indians” because the “tempo of Indian life must be infused into our English expression. . . . We, in India, think quickly, and when we move we move quickly.” ... “There must be something in the sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on. . . . Episode follows episode, and when our thoughts stop our breath stops, and we move on to another thought. This was and still is the ordinary style of our storytelling.”"

"(F.J.: How do we define the classics?) Rao: Whatever talks of realities, not supposed realities, interests me. Iread the classics because of their concerns with fundamentals. The classics are concerned only with fundamentals; otherwise, they wouldn't endure. I would much rather read a great spiritual writer like Dostoevsky or Valery than what is written today. Why read a superficial novel when I could read the Mahabharata or Shankaracharya?...(F.J. Could you name the key classics for you? Rao: The Odyssey, Tristan und Isolde, Genji in Japan, Chinese classical poetry, and of course the Indian literature of all ages. The revival of old Greek myths, in the contemporary literature of France, is very important The classics are always contemporary because they speak of our essential relation to love, life and death. (F.J.: Is the cultural context important here?) Rao: There is no cultural context to love, life and death - Hamlet is universal. Orpheus, Oedipus- these are the fundamental myths of man."

"However, it was from the second tube across the Channel and the tube connecting Montreal to New York, as well as the one connecting New York and Chicago, that they obtained some of their then radical ideas concerning the use of wind power for propulsion. Therefore, before the Undersea Tube had been completed, the engineers in charge had decided to make use of the new method in the world's longest tunnel, and upon that decision work was immediately commenced upon the blue-prints for the great air pumps that were to rise at the two ends—Liverpool and New York. However, I will touch upon the theory of wind-propulsion later and after the manner in which it was explained to me."

"No one who lived through that time will forget the thrill that quickened the pulse of mankind when the American group digging through a seam of old lava under what scientists call the "ancient ridge," broke into a sealed cavern which gleamed in the probing flashlights of the workers like the scintillating points of a thousand diamonds. But when they found the jeweled casket, through whose glass top they peered curiously down upon the white body of a beautiful woman, partly draped in the ripples of her heavy, red hair, the world gasped and wondered."

"It will be recalled by those who have not allowed their view of modern history to become too hazy, that the close of the twentieth century saw a dream of the engineering world at last realized—the completion of the long-heralded undersea railroad. It will also be recalled that the engineers in charge of this stupendous undertaking were greatly encouraged by the signal success of the first tube under the English Channel, joining England and France by rail."

"If my friend the engineer had not told me the Tube was dangerous, I would not have bought a ticket on that fatal night, and the world would never have learned the story of the Golden Cavern and the City of the Dead. Having therefore, according to universal custom, first made my report as the sole survivor of the much-discussed Undersea Tube disaster to the International Committee for the Investigation of Disasters, I am now ready to outline that story for the world."

"Naturally I am aware of the many wild tales and rumors that have been circulated ever since the accident, but I must ask my readers to bear with me while I attempt to briefly sketch, not only the tremendous difficulties to be overcome by the engineers, but also the wind-propulsion theory which was made use of in this undertaking; because it is only by understanding something of these two phases of the Tube's engineering problems that one can understand the accident and its subsequent revelations."

"the purpose of a writer, as Toni Cade Bambara said, "is to make revolution irresistible""

"my "sisters of the corn," as Toni Cade Bambara called Native women."

"I don't know if she knew the heart cling of her fiction. Its pedagogy, its use, she knew very well, but I have often wondered if she knew how brilliant at it she was. There was no division in her mind between optimism and ruthless vigilance; between aesthetic obligation and the aesthetics of obligation. There was no doubt whatsoever that the work she did had work to do. She always knew what her work was for. Any hint that art was over there and politics was over here would break her up into tears of laughter, or elicit a look so withering it made silence the only intelligent response. More often she met the art/politics fake debate with a slight wave-away of the fingers on her beautiful hand, like the dismissal of a mindless, desperate fly who had maybe two little hours of life left...Of course she knew...Perhaps my wondering whether or not she realized how original, how rare her writing is is prompted by the fact that I knew it was not her only love. She had another one. Stronger. As the Essays and Conversations portion of this collection testifies, (especially after the completion of her magnum opus about the child murders in Atlanta) she came to prefer film: writing scripts, making film, critiquing, teaching, analyzing it and enabling others to do the same. The Bombing of Osage Avenue and W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices contain sterling examples of her uncompromising gifts and her determination to help rescue a genre from its powerful social irrelevancy. In fiction, in essays, in conversation one hears the purposeful quiet of this ever vocal woman; feels the tenderness in this tough Harlem/Brooklyn girl; joins the playfulness of this profoundly serious writer. When turns of events wearied the gallant and depleted the strong, Toni Cade Bambara, her prodigious talent firmly in hand, stayed the distance."

"I read writers like Toni Cade Bambera and Toni Morrison because they write fiction that is not boring or alienating to me but moving"

"I look everywhere for signs of that fusion I have glimpsed in the women's movement, and most recently in Nicaragua. I turn to Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters or Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy or James Baldwin's Just above My Head...This kind of art-like the art of so many others uncanonized in the dominant culture-is not produced as a commodity, but as part of a long conversation with the elders and with the future. Such artists draw on a tradition in which political struggle and spiritual continuity are meshed. Nothing need be lost, no beauty sacrificed. The heart does not turn to a stone."

"Native American literature should be important to Americans not as a curio, an artifact of the American past that has little pertinence to an American present or future, but rather as a major tradition that informs American writers ranging from Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and William Faulkner to Adrienne Rich, Toni Cade Bambara, and Judy Grahn."

"As the writer Toni Cade Bambara once put it, the role of the artist is to "make revolution irresistible." Make no mistake about it: overthrowing the fossil-fuel industry is nothing short of a revolution, a rebirth."

"I read the same five people over and over again. But it’s Toni Morrison; Toni Cade Bambara is a huge influence...If you want to talk about studying how somebody can use voice, her fiction is absolutely astonishing in that way. But she was also a genius in sort of a million ways. She was a cultural essayist and very clear about how she understood herself and her work in the world. A hugely influential work for me is her essay, “What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow,” where she talks about, what is the work of a writer? What is the work of what I write? And what are the traditions that I’m going to actively be pulling from? She was really clear—again, sort of like Morrison, they were very close friends—she was really clear about when she was writing about Black women, that she was not writing into the tradition of white feminist literature. She name-checked “The Yellow Wallpaper” and just was like, I’m not interested in that. I’m not interested in talking about characters who are, in her opinion, wallowing in this thing. These characters are going to be actively engaged with the world around them in a very specific way. And that’s the tradition that I’m writing into because that’s the cultural tradition that I understand and see around me in the people around me."

"There have been a lot of things in ... the Black experience for which there are no terms, certainly not in English at this moment. There are a lot of aspects of consciousness for which there is no vocabulary, no structure in the English language which would allow people to validate that experience through language. I'm trying to find a way to do that....I'm trying to break open and get at the bones, deal with symbols as though they were atoms. I'm trying to find out not only how a word gains meaning, but how a word gains power.""

"I think Toni Cade Bambara is an amazing writer. I love Bambara’s work because there is a certain fineness of feeling in her voice. She has a loving sympathetic imagination as well as a great deal of negative capability. There are also currents of redemptive love and joy that run through her work. And she makes me laugh, really, really laugh."

"So used to being unwhole and unwell, one forgot what it was to walk upright and see clearly, breathe easily, think better than was taught, be better than one was programmed to believe—so concentration was necessary to help a neighbor experience the best of herself or himself. For people sometimes believed that it was safer to live with complaints, was necessary to cooperate with grief, was all right to become an accomplice in self-ambush."

"When contemporary feminist movement first began, feminist writings and scholarship by black women was groundbreaking. The writings of black women like Cellestine Ware, Toni Cade Bambara, Michele Wallace, Barbara Smith, and Angela Davis, to name a few, were all works that sought to articulate, define, speak to and against the glaring omissions in feminist work, the erasure of black female presence."

"I'm attempting to blueprint for myself the merger of these two camps: the political and the spiritual. The possibilities of healing that split are exciting. The implications of actually yoking those energies and of fusing that power quite take my breath away."

"Silence. Stillness. To give her soul a chance to attend its own affairs at its own level."

"Got to give it all up, the pain, the hurt, the anger and make room for lovely things to rush in and fill you full."

"She made revolution irresistible"