Women Authors From The United States

"("On why she writes") Because I can't not. I mean, what else am I going to do with my life? That's another way of putting it. I simply must. Writers simply can't help themselves. In a way they're sort of like the queen of England. Every writer is doomed to his or her profession. What else is the queen going to do with her life? She was born a queen; she's stuck. And writers are stuck, too."

"Remember Cynthia Ozick's story, "The Shawl"? In that extraordinarily moving story, Ozick doesn't once mention the word, Holocaust; she focuses on the conflicts of a mother and her two daughters trying to survive the horrors of death-camp internment. That's what good fiction does, and should do."

"I think the word is intractable. I blame the lack of live and let live. And which side is it coming from more than the other side? I think it is coming from people who call other people infidels. That's how it strikes me." Was she moved the first time she went to Israel? "Yes. Probably not like my father, who was simply swept away. He couldn't get over that he had ascended Mount Zion. I don't see any solution here. I'm despairing. That's where I stand."

"(Tell us about your favorite short story.) There are too many to be tempted to isolate only one, so here are five: “Lighea” (sometimes titled “The Professor and the Mermaid”), by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa; “My Quarrel With Hersh Rasseyner,” by Chaim Grade; Chekhov’s “Ward Six”; Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych”; James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” (everyone’s autobiography)."

"(If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?) “History of the Jews,” by Heinrich Graetz…it taught me that a writer lacking history, however gifted, is an empty sack."

"(And about your favorite poem.) “Dover Beach,” by Matthew Arnold. And running neck-and-neck, Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and Auden’s “September 1, 1939.” All are cutting-edge images of the 21st century so far."

"sometimes starting is so difficult. Because it's all chaos. It's the difference between writing an essay, which if it's about Henry James, at least you know that much. But with fiction you don't. It could be a scene in your mind or it could be some kind of tendril that you can barely define. So I have to force it. And then after – and this is real compulsion, real self-flagellation – it kind of takes off. But there's a lot of agony before. And sometimes during. And sometimes all through. But just before the end and revelations start coming, that's the joy. But mostly its hell."

"Sometimes repugnance overrides psychological curiosity, and sometimes psychological curiosity is no more illuminating than pornography."

"In the middle of the war there was Heine, there was Goethe, there was Schiller. I did posters for the German club, in the middle of the war. When I think back to how happy I was, studying German and flunking algebra, and I think what was going on for other Jewish teenagers on the other side of the world, I'm so puzzled by those dates."

"I have argued this question, novel versus essays, and I do come out on the novel side. Because though both these forms use intellect and imagination, they do it in different proportions — the essay more on the intellect side and the novel more on the imaginative side. And the imaginative is freedom. You're at liberty to inhabit other people — including the bad guys — which is sometimes very thrilling, since you won't do it in real life. (On how imagining "the bad guy" relates to empathy) It's the beginning of empathy, indeed. And it's also a place where you can make judgments, where you can enter other people's minds and at the same time subtly, not didactically, not as if you're giving a sermon or a tract. But you can also make judgments, and they can be social judgments, moral judgments, metaphysical judgments."

"It seems to me that more can be found about a writer in any single sentence in a work of fiction, say, than in five or ten full-scale biographies. Or interviews!"

"If you're alone too much," Persky said, "you think too much." "Without a life," Rosa answered, "a person lives where they can. If all they got is thoughts, that's where they live."

"The lower imagination, the weaker, falls into the proliferation of images. My hope is someday to be able to figure out a connection between the work of monotheism-imagining and the work of story-imagining. Until now I have thought of these as enemies."

"The insight that the largest, deepest, widest imaginative faculty of all is what you need to be a monotheist teaches me that you simply cannot be a Jew if you repudiate the imagination."

"“...this is very nice, cozy. You got a nice cozy place, Lublin." "Cramped," Rosa said. "I work from a different theory. For everything, there's a bad way of describing, also a good way. You pick the good way, you go along better." "I don't like to give myself lies," Rosa said. "Life is short, we all got to lie.”"

"Because she fears the past she distrusts the future — it, too, will turn into the past."

"there was a time when a new novel came out — let's take Saul Bellow — and it was a public event. And really, it wasn't just an elitist hobby. I remember — this goes way, way back into my early childhood — when Gone with the Wind was published, the world was whirling around this novel. I remember walking to school and seeing shopkeepers sitting outside their shops reading Gone with the Wind. This was an event. It changed people's minds. Maybe I have a yearning for that, though I don't see it would ever happen again. On the other hand, didn't we see that with Downton Abbey? So maybe it isn't all lost."

"no book makes me furious. Maybe sad, or lost, or confused, but mostly joy and wonder are the emotions involved. That’s why I prefer books to people."

"We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are. ("Justice to Feminism")"

"I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing...I read in order to find out what I need to know: To illuminate the riddle."

"Wars, invented and organized by the highest available consciousnesses (do the worms go to war? do the fish? do the paramecia?), are the planet's chief source and cause of torment. ("The Biological Premises of Our Sad Earth-Speck")"

"We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution. ("Justice to Feminism")"

"(What sustained you without publication during that period?) Belief. Not precisely self-belief, because that faltered profoundly again and again. Belief in Art, in Literature: I was a worshipper of Literature...I no longer believe in Literature, capital L, with the same fervor I used to. I’ve learned to respect living, perhaps. I think I have gotten over my fear of largeness as well, because I have gotten over my awe—my idolatrous awe. Literature is not all there is in the world, I now recognize. It is, I admit, still my all, but it isn’t the all. And that is a difference I can finally see."

"She thought: How hard it is to change one’s life. And again she thought: How terrifyingly simple to change the lives of others."

"What we think we are surely going to do, we don't do; and what we never intended to do, we may one day notice that we have done, and done, and done. (Forward)"

"One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language."

"I always knew that this was what I wanted to do. I think this is true of most writers — especially anybody who's read Little Women, which is every writer. Not so much the male writers, let's admit it, but every writer who grows up has wanted to be Jo."

"To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination. I no longer think of imagination as a thing to be dreaded."

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) Language as the well of image and feeling. Nabokov rather than Hemingway. If less is more, it is nevertheless also loss. And the easy vernacular is deprivation."

"[After someone mentions the Holocaust] Oh yes – and I hope you feel the same towards the African holocaust? My ancestors were involved in both – on all sides as I'm sure you know, millions more Africans were killed in the African holocaust and their oppression continues today on a global scale in a way it doesn't for Jews... and many Jews (my ancestors too) were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade which is of course why there were so many early synagogues in the Caribbean. So who are victims and what does it mean? We are victims and perpetrators to some extent through choice. And having been a victim does not give you a right to be a perpetrator."

"I came in here ... and I was looking for information and I still haven’t heard a definition of anti-Semitism that I can work with ... [shouting from audience] and in terms of Holocaust day, wouldn't it be wonderful if Holocaust day was open to all people who experienced Holocaust ... [shouting from audience] in practice, it’s not actually circulated and advertised as such."

"[W}hat debt do we owe the Jews?"

"Sweden avoided World War II, sparing itself the German occupation that Norway endured and the Soviet invasion suffered by the Finns. During the Cold War, Sweden continued its neutral path...[and] declined to join NATO. And then Feb. 24, 2022, happened. The Russian invasion of Ukraine brought into sharp relief the limitations of being in Europe but not having the security guarantees of NATO’s collective defense pact. The Finns — dragging the Swedes with them — applied for membership in the alliance."

"This country took me and my family in when we were at one of the lowest points of our lives and returned to me a feeling I had lost: that of being safe. I was so proud when I eventually took the oath of citizenship and posed for photos, waving an American flag, in front of the courthouse where I was sworn in."

"I have always been a daughter of two countries, in large part because without America, my adopted country, my native country of Liberia would not exist."

"Over the years, she has gained a solid reputation as a poet. She is also an accomplished painter. One of her favorite subjects, the centaur, reflects what she calls "my hybrid status...like the centaur, I have always felt misunderstood and isolated-whether with Indians or with non-Indians.""

"This is a plural society and all of us have to work at it a little bit to get the full flavor of the society."

"I would much rather be respected by the Indian community through my writing than to have my books reviewed in the New York Times."

"if Indians are left out of every other class on the university campus, even where they are pertinent-for example, leaving Scott Momaday out of a class on twentieth-century American literature, something like that somewhere else there has to be a balance. There has to be someone somewhere else who is going to emphasize Scott Momaday to the exclusion of the ones who are emphasized in the other class. I hope that at some point that will become balanced. I hope that pretty soon an American literature class will just automatically include someone like Scott Momaday-and some of the other people: Charles Eastman, you know, the other writers in our history."

"We are parts of the earth that walk around and have individual consciousness for awhile and then go back."

"I think it's impossible to be governed with any sense of integrity when you don't recognize each other and have no obligation to each other."

"One way that they [Kachinas] can be thought of is if you think of the entire earth as being one being and we as small beings living on that large being like fleas on a cat."

"What a lot of people don't realize is there were a number of revolts against the Spanish mission by the Indians. But they don't tell you this in the museums. In fact, the museum right here in Oakland paints a ridiculous picture of the missions with the happy little natives making baskets in the shade of the adobe with the benevolent padres walking around rattling their rosaries. That just is not the way that the missions were."

"(Could you describe your writing process?) Well, I explained it one time, on radio, as the sensation of being sick in your stomach, in that you suddenly have to throw up, suddenly, you have to vomit. There is no way you can stop it. It has to happen. It's a bodily process in which the material is expelling itself from your body. That's what it feels like to me in a mental or emotional way. Suddenly it's there and it has to be expelled. It's going to come out whether I want it to or not. If I don't have something to write on, it comes out of my mouth. It's got to come out one way or another."

"the way I think of it-now I don't really know where the poems or where the art comes from, I don't know where the images come from-but however they come or wherever they come from is like communicating with a person. It's a whole person. That person shows you things and has a certain appearance but also tells you things. So as you receive images, they are either received through the ear or through the eye or through the tongue and that's just the way it feels."

"anywhere in America, if you take a university-level course on American history or American literature, particularly in literature and the arts, it only has the literature and the arts that are produced by Americans of European heritage, even then largely Northern European. We are left out of the books. Black people are left out; brown people are left out; Indian people are left out. So you get the impression, going through the American education system, that the only people here are white people. It's not just a cultural matter, but it's a political matter. There is a reason for a society to be that way, that has the literary capacity and the technological capacity that America has; there's no excuse for the people being so blind, for the people to be wearing a blindfold that way. The only possible reason it could happen is because it's not an accident; that it's planned. Somebody is benefiting by having Americans ignorant about what non-European Americans are doing and what they have done; what European Americans have done to them. Somebody is benefiting by keeping people ignorant."

"Wendy is an intensely serious person-though not slow to laughter-and her well-informed anger showed in both the poem she chose to read and in the directness of her responses."

"Native American writers have always been a major influence on me, like Wendy Rose, Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Paula Gunn Allen, just to name a few."

"All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. (1958)"

"I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both. (1956)"