Women Authors From The United States

"The imperialist roots of federal Indian law present daunting obstacles to justice for American Indians. If American Indians are to experience real environmental justice-which means not only ending the poisoning of their environments but also regaining access to and protection of their sacred sites and ancient territories-it means confronting a "state built on the pillars of capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy." The confrontation must occur at all levels, from the individual to the institutional, and ultimately dismantle the legal, social, and policy frameworks that uphold an ongoing system of domination. Indigenizing environmental justice in these ways goes beyond a distributive model of justice."

"Europeans brought with them a worldview that was built on the domination of the natural world. We find ourselves, as a result, in the middle of a sixth mass extinction event. And so how do we shift that? This is where indigenous knowledge is so important. Native people understand the world in a whole different way. We understand ourselves as related and part of this web of life. We have to change our relationship to the natural world. And this is where Native people and Indigenous knowledge have so much power to effect that change. Part of indigenizing environmental justice is infusing environmental justice with this indigenous worldview, with traditional ecological knowledge so that we can create these changes."

"White liberal environmentalists are who I write to. They are ultimately my audience because they need to understand historical context, and then once they do, this context can re-shape their projects and how they work."

"I am very skeptical about Native people’s ability to find justice in the settler system because it is a system created not by us and not for us, ultimately to disappear us. I think some good can come from working within that system, but it remains to be seen what large-scale positive impact it can have."

"I think if you are looking at decolonization as the framework for correcting these historical wrongs, giving land back is really the bottom line. But I also think it’s more than giving the land back: I think you have to restructure the legal system too."

"This concept of “indigenizing” environmental justice acknowledges that the way we understand environmental justice is far too narrow to fit for Native Americans. Environmental justice is about the fair and equal distribution of environmental risks and harms that disproportionately expose communities of color. But that depends on understanding all communities as equal as ethnic minority communities. And this just does not fit for American Indian people and communities because American Indians are not ethnic minorities. American Indians are nations with territories, sovereignty, and jurisdiction and entirely different histories that go back millennia on the land as well as histories of colonization, which is not true for any other population on this continent."

"everybody takes for granted that equality under the State is what everybody wants. For Native people, that has never been their goal. Vine Deloria in 1969 said in his book, Custer Died for Your Sins, that “what we need is a national leave-us-alone policy.” He wrote his book in the middle of the Civil Rights, Black Panthers, and Black Power era, and he was very clear that what we want is not what you want. We don’t want equality, we want our treaties to be honored and our territories to be protected."

"Most people don’t realize that Native Americans are the only people who didn’t have religious freedom in this country. Our religions were outright banned beginning around 1883."

"As its history with American Indians has shown, the US complies with laws it makes or agrees to only haphazardly at best, and often not at all. Indians have always had to fight to defend their lives, lands, and treaties. Resistance became a way of life a long time ago; only the tactics change. The federal government has never relinquished power over Native people without a fight, and the degree to which it has is directly attributable to work initiated by Native people themselves. In other words, more than any "granting" of rights by the United States, it is their bold assertions of self-determination, aided at times by powerful allies, that accounts for progress Native people have made in their relationships with the United States over the last century. Indigenous peoples have learned that no one is coming to save them, just as environmentalists have learned that their American legal system is a rigged game against the environment and their own communities. This is a pattern engrained by the forces of white settler colonialism and domination paradigms, but the growing sophistication in using education, law, and politics to advance tribal self-determination will continue to build a wall of defense against environmentally destructive corporate and government encroachments. There is no denying that the fossil fuel industry as we once knew it is dying. Even as its government puppets desperately grasp to hold on to power as the final drops of oil and gas are sucked from the Earth, the last chunks of coal are wrenched from the ground, and the nuclear industry continues to perpetuate the lie of its comparable cleanness, effective partnerships with allies in the environmental movement will provide the best defense for the collective well-being of the environment and future generations of all Americans, Native and non-Native alike. In the long run, environmental justice for American Indians is environmental justice for everyone... and for the Earth herself."

"for us as Native people, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is not what we are working towards. It has to be anti-colonial. Any diversity and equity or anti-racist work that doesn’t include an anti-colonial commitment just perpetuates further erasure. We need to have the language for that."

"that is what settler colonialism does: it works really hard to hide itself, because its goal is to constantly disappear Indigenous people, and that doesn’t square with democracy and justice. That’s why we have this whole matrix of mythologies and lies about the foundation of this country that doesn’t get to the genocide and land theft, and that is the elephant in the living room in the U.S."

"For Native nations and activists, the Green New Deal holds promise. Its commitment to principles of environmental justice is highly relevant to us, but can only work if articulated in a way that addresses our specific concerns. We might think of this as “Indigenizing” environmental justice and see the Green New Deal as decolonizing work."

"We need to imagine new frameworks for law and policy that articulate with specificity what Native people envision as a more just system, one that accurately represents our interests. This can best be accomplished by reinforcing the inherent sovereignty of tribal governments — recognizing our nationhood and political relationship with the U.S."

"Perhaps the dreaded moment has come now to call it a failure. Or perhaps the pulse that still beats here in these United States will save the body of the Earth from the death that hovers so close. This new world, vast, rich, brilliant, electric, is sick too with the other organs and members of the whole planet. A continent to which, for centuries, the persecuted, the frightened, the poor, the courageous, the ambitious, the unafraid could come by the millions to find freedom and a new life is now contaminated by the old-world sickness so that it cries, in its delirium, "Down with the rich, down with the poor! Down with the Jews, down with the Catholics! Down with the freedom of the press, down with freedom of speech, down with freedom of worship!" Down, then, with everything that brought to this country the Huguenots, the Pilgrims, the Quakers; the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Lutherans, the Catholics, the Jews; the Irish, Italian, Turkish, English, Spanish, Swedish, Polish, Rumanian, Hungarian, Russian, Greek, German, Bohemian, Austrian people. The North American continent they had for the taking; a vast world on which they were free to have such land as pleased them, where they might worship as they pleased, where they might walk, talk, laugh, sing, play, work as they pleased. I sometimes think, with pain, of what it might mean to the persecuted minorities of Europe today if suddenly, out of the Atlantic, there should rise a vast and gleaming virgin continent to which they, like our own ancestors here in America-yours and mine-could go for safety and healing. But there is no Columbus now, and no new land for refuge. And laughter has gone out of the world. A lovely sound, laughter. It has been banished by a madman with a comic mustache, himself subject for laughter. So perhaps millions will perish again for the lack of one spirit to revive the inner spirit of all. Sometimes, as I have listened to the wise and humane words of the man Franklin Roosevelt, I have thought that he alone, in these past five hideous years, has had the courage and the vision and the skill to try to devise a cure for a sick and dying world. But the measures he is taking require almost super-human effort, for he must fight the virulent hatred of the very rich, and the inertia caused by the white blood corpuscles of the very poor, and the curious indifference of the vast American middle class."

"The energy of American Jewish writers was so charged, so buoyant, that for a time they appeared to dominate American fiction. But there was so little Jewish energy in this art that one could invent parlor games over the ethnic or religious identity of its authors: Edna Ferber? Waldo Frank? Lillian Hellman? Nathanael West? Norman Mailer? E. L. Doctorow?"

"the habit of years is not easily overcome."

"This is certain: I never have written a line except to please myself. I never have written with an eye to what is called the public or the market or the trend or the editor or the reviewer. Good or bad, popular or unpopular, lasting or ephemeral, the words I have put down on paper were the best words I could summon at the time to express the thing I wanted more than anything else to say."

"I am not so naïve as to be oblivious of evil and ugliness, but I thought that the bulk of the human race wanted, deep down, to be good if only they could, somehow. A childish belief, perhaps. But I shrink from relinquishing it. I am not astonished at brutality, nor at the weak yielding to it. I know that man belongs to the animal kingdom. But I know, too, that he is superior to other animals through the possession of that intangible something called the spirit. Just as I believe that God is Good and that Good is God, so I believe that Good (and therefore God) lives within each of us. Each one of us is not only an animal, but a spirit. And for that reason alone (though there are a thousand others) I marvel that every decent human being does not reject the spiritual murder which accompanies the scourge of Fascism, Nazism and Communism. Of the three, the Nazi plan will perish first, not because of the Nazi brutality, but because of the Nazi vulgarity and insolence. As in 1914 (and always) the German nation now reckons mathematically without considering the human equation. A mistake."

"She seized hungrily upon the stray crumbs of conversation that fell to her."

"Early in my short-story career I hit upon the character of a traveling saleswoman named Mrs. Emma McChesney. I never had met or seen a traveling saleswoman and I don't know why I named her Emma McChesney, but she became enormously popular and very nearly turned out to be my undoing. The first story, entitled Representing T. A. Buck, was published in the American Magazine in 1911. I hadn't meant to write a series, but at the urging of the editors I tried a second, called Roast Beef Medium. Well, that did it. The American businesswoman, inexplicably enough, had not been presented in fiction. This now seems incredible, but it was so. The magazine-reading public took Emma to its heart...Emma was hearty, salty, good as gold (better), and oh, so courageous. She was fine in her day, but this is not it; she is as dated as the Featherloom Petticoats she sold..."

"It takes a determined woman to make tea biscuit for no one but herself."

"On his face was a queer look-the look of one who is embarrassed because he is about to say something honest."

"I have lived in the best of all possible worlds; the only world, so far as we know, on which human beings can live and have their being; it has been my privilege to be a human being on the planet Earth. There is, for me, something fantastic in the idea of being here at all. Always I have felt a little incredulous of the whole business."

"During World War I and World War II, I wrote few short stories. I wrote, in fact, little of anything other than propaganda, and for ordered propaganda writing I have scant ability. Thousands of fictional so-called war stories were written. Few possessed the slightest value. The best, in my opinion, were those published in The New Yorker during World War II. Some of these were brilliant, courageous, and carried a terrific impact."

"It is difficult to write a really good short story because it must be a complete and finished reflection of life with only a few words to use as tools. There isn't time for bad writing in a short story. In a novel one can be dull for pages and still get away with it. It is, to me, an interesting and baffling fact that today, more than thirty years after The Homely Heroine was written, it still is as difficult for me to write a short story (or anything, for that matter) as it was when first I began. A single short story may take a month, six weeks, two months to write. Usually, the easier they are to read the harder they are to write. Often a short story theme may take a year of conscious and subconscious thinking before it is ripe for writing. Sometimes a possible short story seems too tough to be worth the fight. But it stays around, taunting you, daring you to come on, and finally you write it to be rid of it...In some cases the reader may feel, after reading a short story, approximately the sensation he has experienced after having too hastily eaten a heavy meal. He has treated a dinner as a snack and his digestion rebels."

"All my writing life I have written to please first myself. Never, except wartime, have I written to order on a theme or subject definitely requested or suggested. But war, to me, is not life at all. It is an excrescence, a cancer on the body of civilization."

"She seemed to put an enormous amount of energy into those cleanings-as if they were a sort of safety valve."

"It is monstrous that a single pathological madman should, in a world we thought civilized, bring down indescribable agony, humiliation and death upon hundreds of thousands of people of one religion; a religion which, persecuted through the centuries, has welded its followers into something akin to a race. As though under some evil spell the countries of the world have stood by while this latest savagery has gone on. Of course the German Jew belongs in Germany as long as he cares to remain there, just as the Italian Jew belongs in Italy, the English Protestant belongs in England, the Swedish Lutheran belongs in Sweden. Suppose that the United States were dictator ruled (which is unthinkable). And suppose that that dictator were to announce to an amazed world that the Presbyterians or the Episcopalians or the Baptists or the Lutherans or the Catholics were the cause of all the ills that had come upon America; that they were swine, dogs, thieves, impure of blood-all that is vile; and that they must leave the country forthwith, penniless and homeless, to wander until they died. This would be as reasonable, as just, as sane as that which has come upon the Jews of Germany, and which may well be visited upon the Jews of other European countries if this barbarism is permitted to go on. It is a world I do not recognize."

"Writing is lonely work but the creative writer is rarely alone. The room in which one works is peopled with the men and women and children of the writer’s imagination … Often they are so much more fascinating to the writer than the living people one actually encounters that to go to a party, a dinner, even to the company of chosen people created by oneself."

"New life must come from within. As for contentment-I don't even want it."

"The sharp-tongued Kitty O’Hara used to say that being an old maid was a great deal like death by drowning—a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling."

"It's just something that only luck or an accident can mend," said the nerve specialist. "Time may do it but I doubt it. Sometimes just a word-the right word-will set the thing in motion again. Does he get any letters?"

"It marked an epoch in Chet's life-that letter. It reached out across the Atlantic Ocean from the Chester Ball of his Chicago days, before he had"

"It is a pattern of self-immolation familiar to any writer worth reading. The writer does not even remotely look upon this as a hardship. It is a way of life; a necessary an chosen way of life. Witty conversation, purposely dull dialogue, love, murder, marriage, birth, violence, triumph, failure, death—anything can happen in that room."

"“If the man may preach, because the Savior died for him, why not the woman, seeing he died for her also? Is he not a whole Savior, instead of a half one, as those who hold it wrong for a woman to preach, would seem to make it appear?”"

"The persecution, torture, and death of six million European Jews had actually brought little or no protest from a Christian world whose religion was based on the teachings of a Jew."

"Esther was indeed a friend, but a friend is not as deeply rooted in one's heart as one's misery, as one's grief."

"People said: Sheyndl is right as the world. And so decent. But she: inside her heart cried. Every time she looked at her shaytele with the bangs in front, her heart would twinge. . .her head was already bound."

"She took a quick, furtive look at him and felt her heart blushing. ("The Daredevil")"

"The town was in an uproar for some time after the news that Gitman, the Talmud teacher, was a freethinker. Imagine, if they hadn't realized it in time he might have converted the whole town. (first lines of "A Glass")"

"All this talk agitated Nessi. It seemed to her as though they were taking something holy and defiling it. Her train, her happiness. ("The First Train")"

"Just in the past two days the cherry trees had become a riot of blossoms. ("In the Village")"

"Hungry, she'd run to the cemetery and undam a river of tears."

"Old age brings a person troubles. Troubles make a person-make her old and gray before her time. Already little by little and thirty years old."

"I turn to Fradel Schtok and know that another woman writer experienced similar conflicts over mame-loshn. I read her stories of the shtetl and America and see the two worlds between which she was caught...All these Jewish women-Julia, Nadia, Patti, Gina, Fradel, Kadia-are my ancestors. They are mayne bobes, mumes, shvester, my grandmothers, aunts, sisters. Mir darfn zikh bakenen. We need to become acquainted."

"All the way from Maugham and de Maupassant and Chekhov to Ring Lardner the short story has served to portray the characteristics, the habits, the manners, the morals, the emotions of a nation, a whole people. Certainly I knew no such highfalutin arguments as these when first I began to write short stories. I wrote short stories for the same reason that a child has who begins to walk after he has learned to stand up and to balance himself. It was for me the next natural step following newspaper reporting. I still think it is one of the most exhilarating and the most difficult forms of the writing art. When a reader says, "Oh, only a short story!" he has me to fight. There is something about the pace of the short story that catches the tempo of this country. If it is written with sincerity and skill it portrays a mood, a character, a background, or a situation. Sometimes it is not only typically American, it is universal in its feeling; sometimes its inherent truth is not a thing of the month, but of the years. When this is true, that short story is as genuinely a classic as any novel or play or piece of music."

"Gosi, on the other hand, was always a silent type, taciturn, stubborn. And while nobody blamed her, she didn't want to go to parties, always staying quietly at home, obstinately waiting for something. ("Sisters")"

"Annie is an ignorant girl, who can barely sign her name. But even she can feel the music in her head. ("A Cut")"

""So what, a young boychik is better? Playing cards and wasting his time dencing. At least a stable man... So what if he's a little stingy. Vell, a person's got to have some kind of defect." ("Sisters")"

"One must be stubborn to achieve one's goals, to be nobody's fool. ("A Cut")"