Women Authors From The United States

"What a strange alchemy we have worked, turning earth around to destroy itself, using earth's own elements to wound it. ("Deify the Wolf" p66)"

"To walk on this earth is to walk on a living past, on the open pages of history and geology. ("Creations" p79)"

"Can we love what will swallow us when we are gone? I do. I love what will consume us all, the place where the tunneling worms and roots of plants dwell, where the slow deep centuries of earth are undoing and remaking themselves. ("The Caves" p30)"

"I know this telling is the first part of the ceremony, my part in it. It is story, really, that finds its way into language, and story is at the very crux of healing, at the heart of every ceremony and ritual in the older America. ("All My Relations" p37)"

"Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands. ("Walking" p159)"

"Whatever has ended, whatever has begun, is strong in the air. (Chapter 3, p73)"

"It has been my lifelong work to seek an understanding of the two views of the world, one as seen by native people and the other as seen by those who are new and young on this continent. It is clear that we have strayed from the treaties we once had with the land and with the animals. It is also clear, and heartening, that in our time there are many-Indian and non-Indian alike-who want to restore and honor these broken agreements. (Preface)"

"I write out of respect for the natural world, recognizing that humankind is not separate from nature. Some of this work connects the small world of humans with the larger universe, containing us in the same way that native ceremonies do, showing us both our place and a way of seeing. (Preface)"

"Emptiness and estrangement are deep wounds, strongly felt in the present time. We have been split from what we could nurture, what could fill us. And we have been wounded by a dominating culture that has feared and hated the natural world, has not listened to the voice of the land, has not believed in the inner worlds of human dreaming and intuition, all things that have guided indigenous people since time stood up in the east and walked this world into existence, split from the connection between self and land. ("Creations" p82)"

"A bird killed in the name of human power is in truth a loss of power from the world, not an addition to it. ("The Feathers" p15)"

"Change was in the air. It was palpable, a strong presence in the room. (chapter three, p51)"

"At the first light of morning I sat up in bed. The storm by then was dark green and there was still a rhythmic song of falling water, but a larger noise was behind the rain, a great disturbance of air. I went to the window and looked up. In the first spread of light above us was a cloud, a great cloud of flesh and feather so thick the sky itself appeared to be moving as the wings of tundra swans clattered together, as they pulled themselves south. Their voices seemed to wake the land itself, which at that moment lived only for the great, beautiful birds, the sky full and moving. I wasn't dreaming. I had no need to dream. This world I'd entered, however (chapter four p78)"

"What I liked was that land refused to be shaped by the makers of maps. Land had its own will. The cartographers thought if they mapped it, everything would remain the same, but it didn't, and I respected it for that. Change was the one thing not accounted for. (p123)"

""Your mother was a door...Always closed. But sometimes I thought she was a window, instead, because through her I glimpsed scenes of suffering." Even young, I understood this in a way. I understood already from what the women said that my mother was stairs with no destination. She was a burning house, feeding on the air of others. She had no more foundation, no struts, no beams. Always, a person would think she was one step away from collapsing. But she remained standing."

"This is what I know from science: that a grain of dust dwells at the center of every flake of snow, that ice can have its way with land, that wolves live inside a circle of their own beginning. This is what I know from blood: the first language is not our own."

"Sometimes now I hear the voice of my great-grandmother, Agnes. It floats toward me like a soft breeze through an open window. (beginning of Prologue)"

"I only knew that I and my many mothers had been lost in sky, water, and the galaxy, as we rested on a planet so small it was invisible to the turnings of other worlds. (p179)"

"I was seventeen when I returned to Adam's Rib on Tinselman's Ferry. It was the north country, the place where water was broken apart by land, land split open by water so that the maps showed places both bound and, if you knew the way in, boundless. The elders said it was where land and water had joined together in an ancient pact, now broken. The waterways on which I arrived had a history. They had been crossed by many before me..."

"From my many grandmothers, I learned how I came from a circle of courageous women and strong men who had walls pulled down straight in front of them until the circle closed, the way rabbits are hunted in a narrowing circle, but some lived, some survived this narrowing circle of life. (chapter seven, p107)"

"Feminism is a complicated issue for Indian women because what affects the women also affects the entire community. As individual nations, we have allegiances to the members of our tribes that seldom exist for non-Indian American women. Political and economic injustices are practiced against entire tribes, and are not limited to just the women. The issue of survival affects all people and the major efforts of Indian feminists have been struggles against the dominant society."

"Writing is a way to uncover and discover a new truth. It comes from, and speaks to, the deepest well-spring of the human being, the place that is the source of our inner knowledge, intuition and instinct."

"community lies beyond family within the surrounding, enfolding environment. We are co-creators in the universe, the world, within all the rest, all fluid, shifting movement, and without the emphasis on measurement. The world is there in its entirety, not in segments. And we inhabit it. This is what makes us human."

"She was a faith healer, of sorts. By that, I mean she always held a cure for hopelessness, could lay a hand on misery and make it smile could ever hold."

"We are moving so quickly in today's world that our experiences are blurred. We need to slow down so that our senses will awaken and our hearts will open. When we learn this and reconnect to nature we are able to receive her energy and the many gifts she has for us."

"I was told Ammah was a silent god and rarely spoke. The reason for this was that all things--birdsongs, the moon, even my own life--grow from rich and splendid silence. (p265)"

"This is the place where clouds are born and I am floating. (beginning of Chapter 1)"

"I can hear everyone in the living room watching TV. They are together, as if to show that now I am outside this family. I am the source of their problems. I have brought them closer together, joined them in their judgement of me. (p94)"

"I looked down, embarrassed, but she said only, "Some people see scars and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing." (p125)"

"Something must hold me this way, and you, and the thin blue tail of the galaxy, to keep us from leaving as life unfolds behind us over long roads and intricate, human waters."

"How were the philosophies of medical treatment and social rules regarding the ill manifested in the building design of medieval ? This question does not simply instigate consideration into how Islamic hospitals were constructed, but seeks to explore what social rules and understandings of diseases, the ill and treatment can be detected from the buildings themselves by examining them within their environmental, social and philosophical context. The scholarly focus on the architecture and archaeology of hospitals from this era has concentrated on describing architectural details, which are frequently devoid of interpretations related to concepts of healing, beliefs about the body, illness and hygiene prevalent at the time of their construction and use. Yet, it has been shown in more general archaeological and anthropological studies of space that people's relationships to structures are imbued with cultural rules regarding their use, design and flow of movement."

"Roman doctors did not have the same perception of germs as that in the modern West, and there is no recorded evidence of them having purposely sterilized their medical instruments. Medical historians and anthropologists have shown that there are differences in the way that medical objects have been handled in other periods and places that do not conform to modern concepts of hygiene. For example, it may be more important to bless a surgical instrument rather than clean it in order for it to be considered effective. The Roman writer Lucian also gives us the impression that some doctors did not clean or care for their tools as we might expect, when he says that he would rather have a doctor with a rusty knife than a charlatan with a gold one (Adversus Indoctum 29). Thus, archaeologists are warned that they should take care not to apply their own common-sense perceptions onto past activities."

"Although the term 'prehistory' simply indicates a period without evidence for written documents, a hierarchy was created when the subject of archaeology was in its developmental stages in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During this period, societies with writing were deemed to have more scholarly importance and relevance than those without a written language (Schnapp 1996). In certain respects, this division is still maintained, though there is, it is hoped, a growing awareness that societies without writing in both the past and present have rich traditions of oral histories and complex social rules. Groups without a written record should not be thought of as primitive and, therefore, less worthy of investigation ( 2007: 8)."

"She never struck anyone that I can recall; she just made you feel very small. That was enough for discipline. We feared but loved her."

"There is a multitude of men and women doing delightful work in literature and language from Brookline to San Jose, from Kansas City to Toronto, from Birmingham to Seattle, but Florence Holbrook is as distinct in her leadership as are Luther Burbank, Julia Richman, and Jane Addams in their distinctive fields."

"Holbrook has a theory that if children hear the best of literature from the beginning of their education they will never wish for any other."

"I think there's something very special about women writers, black women writers in America and those that I know of in any real sense in Africa-Bessie Head, for example, in Africa or Gloria Naylor here. There's a gaze that women writers seem to have that is quite fascinating to me because they tend not to be interested in confrontations with white men-the confrontation between black women and white men is not very important, it doesn't center the text. There are more important ones for them and their look, their gaze of the text is unblinking and wide and very steady. It's not narrow, it's very probing and it does not flinch. And it doesn't have these funny little axes to grind. There's something really marvelous about that."

"There is no way you can say that realism is the only literature going. I mean, most of our best novelists are not even writing realism a writers like Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Leslie Silko. They are using realistic techniques to tell stories that are not realistic."

"The pupils should retell the stories, thus enriching their vocabulary and learning to express thought clearly, easily, consecutively, and confidently,– a power so much needed and so valuable to citizens of a republic."

"There are some young Black women, however, that I particularly want to talk about, younger than I in any case, young Black women who are writing, who are inspirational to me. For example, a group of young women in Atlanta have a magazine called Sage. I'm impressed with Gloria Naylor's continuing to work. I'm impressed certainly with Alice Walker. I was hopeful and am still hopeful of Alyse Sutherland who wrote a book many years ago called Let the Lion Eat Straw. A wonderful book. Lucille Clifton and Carolyn Rogers and those younger Black women who have not become well known. That they continue to struggle and write is inspirational."

"Museums, theatres, and concert halls are all around us, but what use are they unless you can get the child into the way of having sympathy for the art and the artist, of seeing and hearing the thing itself and talking about it?"

"To me, the great writers who come from ethnic minorities writing in English come from America. I think the deep, the real deep thinkers now writing in the English language are the black women, such as Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, etc. (F.J.: Where they are using black English in a certain kind of way to signify their difference?) Emecheta: Exactly. You must read Naylor's Mama Day, because she's a modern Zora Neale Hurston. She uses language when it comes to conversation that is not like anything else. So there's an amalgam of the old and the new, and it's beautifully written, the way she's written it. She's a child of today, so she knows what she's talking about."

"Perhaps of the books that we were reading, the one that really stands out the most about the American dream is The Street (by Ann Petry)."

"They are acceptable. The Colin Powells of America. It was such a phenomenon to me, that Colin Powell was so deeply loved by the American media and actually tabbed as becoming president. And when you look back at the man, you sort of understood what could be more American than someone who was willing to die for this country. You know, then then a man who was a general, then a man who was that conservative, you know, a man who was also fair skinned, which was extremely important and who had Republican leanings."

"Florence Holbrook is a woman who is not interested in educational work alone; she is strong enough to be interested in all that affects humanity."

"That’s what the Depression kind of showed, that hard work guaranteed you nothing."

"When I think of the American dream, that’s what I think of something that is manufactured, something that is ethereal, something that’s not quite there yet."

"If you can just first maintain your own humanity, reify your own personal worth. You then flow into the system as an entity."

"When I think of the American dream, I think of exclusivity, to be quite honest with you. I think that dream, just like the Foundation of America, was only held out to a few and it was only met for a few. You know, it was not for the most part, for those who had come from Europe, who were land owners, who were part of the aristocracy, who had helped to them the promise that they could indeed prosper in this country. The Constitution was not intended for people who were landless, for people who were not male, for people who were not white. You know, this country was just simply not founded that way. We had to have amendments in order to make this democracy more and more inclusive. And so with the American dream as well, it was held out to those who were white, to those who were male for the most part, and others had to fight for inclusion in it."

"the incredible Sheree Renée Thomas, who edited the groundbreaking anthology Dark Matter: 100 Years of Speculative Fiction From the African Diaspora."

"It is my sincere hope that Dark Matter will help shed light on the sf genre, that it will correct the misperception that black writers are recent to the field, and that it will encourage more talented writers to enter the genre."