Women Authors From The United States

"Anna Teller was the only refugee on the plane from Munich to New York."

"The first spring after the death is unbearable. Its inexorable, complete awakening. Its compulsive memories. Its intolerable mockery of beauty."

"Many of the passengers could not help staring at Anna Teller. It was mid-December of 1956; all the newspapers they had brought onboard were still headlining one story, and here was part of the story in the flesh."

"The two men, leaning against the billboard in the vacant corner lot, had not spoken for the past fifteen minutes. Victor Hoge was gouging splinters out of a wooden stick with seamed and cracked hands that had not become accustomed to idleness. Jean Boileau, younger, had learned in the last few months, in his cell, in the courtroom and now in his liberty pending appeal, how to remain immobile. Yet it was he who spoke first."

""God-damn! keep your trap shut," he said and blew a suffocating plume of corn whiskey breath into the minister's face. "They ain't nobody going to hear you except us who are going to teach you that whites in the South are not allowed to wallow with niggers and hogs." Shoemaker made no reply. He recrossed his arms, pressing them tight against his chest, thinking: I didn't know men could be so mean. (Chapter 13, 258)"

"The rush of cold air and the buzz of voices woke Pop from his doze. "What's that, what's that?" he said testily, leaning forward in the Morris chair that he would not let Joanna sell. (first lines of "King Lear in Evansville")"

"He warned himself: the one luxury you can't afford is to lose your temper, understand? (Chapter Ten, p169)"

"he thought: this is it. I heard about it; read about it; now I am seeing it. For us, perhaps, there may be only the threat of the men outside. For the others, the threat has become the act. The sequence is manifest, he thought: first, the handful of deputies, next, the organized band of vigilantes, and, finally, the uniformed army of storm troopers. As it happened in Italy, as it happened in Germany, as it is happening in Spain. Now I have had the unclean thing flung into my face. Did I love my own land so much that I thought it could remain undefiled? Did the signs before me in my part of the country appear so faint that I hoped they could easily be washed away? Very well. Now I know; and never will forget and never will stop fighting it. They won't let us have our way of salvation, will they? The corners of his jaw muscles bulged out. While we try to bring it about through love and cooperation, they crush us. They are the law-breakers. They don't give a hang for man-made laws. They never heard of our Father's law that we live together as His children. They use their money and their power, he thought, to degrade other men, like those poor hirelings riding outside, bought by the pro-consuls of the steel and textile corporations. I say that they are making monsters of one set of men in order to crush another set of men. Laws will not stop them, now I know, or reform them, since they admit no laws. We must stop them. Submission won't stop them, he told himself; that's what they want. Jesus didn't teach submission; He taught a morality of initiative. Jesus would have known at once that their violence can be defeated only by action. Very well. Now I know. (Chapter 13, p241)"

"More women than men came down the gang-plank, many of them wearing trousers with ill-fitting overcoats buttoned around them. In the harsh noon light, they appeared to have a curious kinship. They all looked as though something had been chilled inside of them and then hollowed out. Although some were shouting, like the men and women on the pier, although some were hysterical, like the men and women crowding around the plank, although some were dazed, there was a difference between them and the persons who awaited them. Some cheerful, recognizable human quality had been subtracted from them. They were the second group of survivors from the Matrix, the pleasure ship that had gone to the bottom before it had even reached Caribbean waters. (beginning of "To Be Alive")"

"Throughout the afternoon, the woman's voice had been seldom heard. With her pale clean hands curved around the rolled papers on her lap, she sat on a folding chair beside the dusty filing cabinets. More frequently than she spoke, she uttered a succession of dry sounds, clearing her throat. Behind the desk, the red-haired man in shirt sleeves, with tie and collar loosened, was reading aloud in a voice that matched his imperturbable expression. He looked up from his letters only when the man sitting on the window sill interrupted him with an explosive comment. (first lines)"

""Why don't you marry me?" "Because I don't want to. I don't want to marry any one." She felt stifled and ill, and she pushed him away, saying irritably: "Anyway, you're a Fascist, too." (Chapter 6, p106)"

"Every day he expected to find in his mail an anonymous letter, beginning "It may interest you to know that your wife...""

"...she stayed behind in the vestibule of the train, leaning against the wall in an effort to knit together her nerves before she faced the others. (Chapter seven, p107)"

"No one would suppose that they were mother and daughter and few really knew. Sometimes her mother introduced her as her sister; more often, as a young friend."

"Bart, the hairdresser, sassed the customers when he wasnt clowning or reciting brash tales about his private life. The customers seemed to enjoy it."

"Wasteland, created what gay historian Jonathan Katz has called “probably the most complex, human, and affirmative portrait of a homosexual (female or male) to appear in American fiction” before 1964."

"Published in 1946 and winner of the prestigious Harper Prize, Jo Sinclair's Wasteland was startling for its psychological precocity and for a boldness of social feeling that linked Jews, blacks, and homosexuals as cultural outsiders in a time when very few were able to make that parallel...Wasteland is a remarkable social document, a state-of-the-art observation of the American-Jewish situation in the early forties, made calmly, clearly, and in an undefended manner. Never again would there be such calm in American-Jewish novels. As the process of assimilation went inexorably forward (and American Jews simultaneously learned the full truth of the Holocaust), a kind of frenzy seized the writers. It was as though they were terrified of what they were doing... or rather, of what they were no longer free not to do... and they became slightly hysterical. Saul Bellow and Philip Roth made the words Jewish and manic synonymous. "What are we doing? What are we doing?" their novels scream at us, from Augie March on. Jo Sinclair reminds us of the quiet before the storm, of that moment of speculation and insight that precedes the turbulence of engagement. Her novel, unquestionably, is part of the record of an absorbing and complicated piece of life."

"In the 1940s James Baldwin, Robert Duncan, and Jo Sinclair published pioneering works affirming the homosexual’s humanity."

"Mrs. H., the seamstress, and her mysterious husband whom nobody had everseen, it was assumed that he was bedridden, since the dressmaker frequently would excuse herself, saying, "Would you mind if I just take a look in at Mr. H?" There really was no Mr. H. The backroom contained nothing but a bed, and a chiffonier, on whose flat top stood a decanter, bearing the inscription "Gin" and wearing around it's neck a tag, "Henry Hanse." No one and nothing else occupied the room but an easel; on it reposed a portrait of a youngish man wearing a very tall collar and a large stickpin in his tie."

"Sinclair published two lesbian novels that, more than a half-century later, still merit reading. In addition, despite society’s intolerance and her own internal struggles, her 1942 draft is a brief beacon, a point at which a left-wing lesbian writer wrote about the love of two white working-class high school girls, one of them the story’s Jewish protagonist—a butch lesbian who sees connections among sexuality, gender expression, and race. Although she destroyed the 1931 draft that she had written as a teenager, she chose to send the 1942 draft to be archived, along with her other papers—knowing that, as a result, her legacy would include the draft’s teenaged lesbians. As we celebrate The Changelings as an early lesbian, feminist, and anti-racist novel, written by a Jewish lesbian, we can find in the 1942 draft a different voice, one that we have largely lost. And we should honor that voice as well."

"The word Depression faded from the American air, but in her it would never fade completely, she knew that. (chapter Five, p177)"

"His own suffering, preceding the similar experiences of his nephews, makes him unwilling to face the idea of progeny. He is afraid of the continued perpetuation of "wasteland," and yet he now tries courageously to discover the truth of that condition, the source of it, perhaps the cure.... (chapter Five, p194)"

"The big desk was somewhat like a bridge between the doctor and him; at one end the doctor sat, and here at this end he sat, waiting for the moment when he could take a few further awkward steps upon that bridge into understanding, into reasoning. (Chapter Three, p77)"

"The walls of Saturday moved in on him with a combined pressure of fear and relief, the walls of a confessional. And yet these walls were different, too, pressing as they did ever closer toward him. (Chapter Six, p195)"

"It was Saturday again. Today he was eager to be here. Already he shared with the walls of this office the intimacy of secrets released, the wonderful freedom of shame and pain eased, even the inch of secret, the first few stumbling steps of ease. (Chapter Three, p77)"

"[He] suddenly leaned and pounded the coffee table. "Must the pattern be so set?" he demanded with bitterness. "A generation doesn't have to repeat itself...leave your poor twisted childhood. End it-don't trap another child in it"...when they had gone, her terrified recognition of what he had said was still there. The Ballroom was icy with the truth of every word. (book 5 chapter 5)"

""Don't I have a right to live?" she said. "Can't a woman live even if she is a mother?" (book 5 chapter 5)"

"Even in the secrecy of his own mind, Jake called him "the doctor." He hated the word psychiatrist. He hated it even if Debby did say it was a beautiful word. (first lines, Chapter One)"

""...Do you have anything definite on which to pin your dislike? Or is it a cloak for your dislike of someone else? Or perhaps yourself?" (Chapter Five, p159)"

"A beautiful thing happened...Her loneliness was gone. Even the night time was less piercing for the happiness of the day preceding it, the day that was so filled with a presence, a little living possession who changed excitingly from week to (book 2 chapter 3)"

"...again, it was the urgent, wholly understanding tones of love she thought she heard, even in the whisper. Her throat felt parched, as if she had sung along with one of her records for a long time. (book 2 chapter 5)"

"It was as if he had an insistence, too: never to see the actual Catherine, never to need the inner figure of shy and beautiful delicacy. (book 1 chapter 7)"

"It was as if he insisted, time after time, that she could be only a body. Why couldn't he see her shy heart, her eager studying mind? Why couldn't her delicate ways of help flow gently into his way?-not the sickeningly sudden grab, the (book 1 chapter 9)"

"...only the screaming came out, no words, just the sounds of loneliness and fear (book 1 chapter 1)"

"How fast the evening had passed, with its newnesses boxed one within the next like constantly opening flashes of excitement. (book 3 chapter 5)"

"He began quietly to tell her the details of Kenny's letter, and as she listened she thought with a kind of tired and comfortable amusement that the ghosts were really catching up with her. Ralph, or her lie to herself, had kept them away for more than a year. But all ghosts had the right, sooner or later, to frighten the people they haunted. (book 5 chapter 2)"

"Like touching an old scar, she felt again the crushing sense of responsibility, the sensation of being mysteriously punished... (book 3 chapter 6)"

"You remember how that word echoed and echoed inside of you all the way home...All the way home, the word said itself in you like a squeezing fist. (Chapter Nine, p299)"

"In the darkness, he found her and it was as if the discovery encompassed him at the same time. She was in a secret forest-place of night, where no pain could enter. His body, his lips and hands, made gleams of light by which she could read at last all the answers to hunger. (book 3 chapter 6)"

"For a second of intense hurt, she remembered all the fires, all the joy of those yesterdays which had merged so quickly. There had never been a calendar to life; excitement and fun had been timeless. Every day had been the present, fast and dangerous, the never-ending moment of leadership. (chapter 8, p127)"

"She saw his dreamer eyes; the dream was love, togetherness, two people together. She saw his whole dreamer self, and she called his name. (p297)"

"[He] could not move for a while. When at last he went to put the last gate up over the door and to snap shut the locks, a confusion of walls and gates and locks swirled through his head. Don't make a wall in my head, he thought tremblingly. That's all I ask. Please! (chapter 6, p110)"

"All that summer, as no white people came to rent the empty, upstairs suites of the Valenti house or the Golden house, tension had mounted in the street. Only Negroes came. (first lines)"

"They started off the porch, and [she] felt the poems moving with her into the street, like a singing. (p309)"

""Listen to her," [he] said. "A voice like iron. That one will never rent or sell to them. They are more her enemy than ours, even. Remember...even an Italian has his Hitler." (chapter 3, p43)"

"Liz picked a stifling evening in late summer to describe love. She yanked the word from a misty, delicately poised niche in Catherine's mind and flung it down newly expressed. The brutish meaning turned real as the smell and touch, the sounds, out of one of the childhood memories always hiding at the back of Catherine's mind. ( first lines)"

"Obstacles which have kept him from complete participation have been dissolved. At this year's ceremony, he can recognize without bitterness what is there for him, as well as what can never be there. Recognizing the inadequacies, he knows he need not be hurt by them.... (Chapter Eleven, p334)"

"The same liquor, the same scar tissue, the same fear-sound of [his] cough flying into the Ballroom: for [her], everything had seemed reiteration out of the ghostly series of yesterdays. Only she was different. Everything seemed blurred and unformed wood, only she chiseled out into actuality, the need of body, the lips shaped to the sound of longing.( p261)"

"...How could anything as delicate as love turn into the harsh accusation of [his] eyes? (book 3 chapter 11)"

"The evening became more and more tender, as if [she] were holding the glass bowl of the Ballroom between her palms and watching it fill slowly with all the nostalgia and sadness, the yearning prolonged embraces, of a farewell. (book 3 chapter 11)"