Women Authors From The United States

"Every action, physical or psychical, involves either integration or disintegration."

"There is no more antagonism between growth and reproduction than between growth and thought, growth and muscular activity, growth and breathing."

"The antagonism is only that of action and reaction, which are but two phases of the same process—opposing phases which exist everywhere, and which must exist, or action itself cease, and death reign universally."

"Growth and eating are antagonistic."

"If it could be shown that men or women who are the parents of many children have thereby lost something of individual power, we might then be forced to admit that the greater cost related to the reproductive system in women must be at their personal expense, not at the expense of the nutriment which they assimilate and eliminate."

"Every action, physical or psychical, involves either integration or disintegration; every use of faculty belongs to the latter class. There is no more antagonism between growth and reproduction than between growth and thought, growth and muscular activity, growth and breathing."

"…I’m curious about how my memories — and other people’s memories, too — are tied to the senses, particularly touch. Memories triggered by engagement with one or more of the five senses can conjure up transformative moments in a person’s life. Unexpected sounds, scents, tastes, sights, and tactile experiences can move people outside the present moment and into a more playful space where past, present, and future come together…"

"…I consider these fantasy and futuristic visions as absurd as me acquiescing to someone else’s ideas about what counts as acceptable, attractive and beautiful. These parody ads are my attempt to envision a different future, in which black women inquire and inspire while loving their hair."

"…When I read comics, I’m helping people to appreciate the power of pictures with words, and of words with pictures. Reading a comic, or a graphic novel, is different from reading a novel or describing a picture book. I care about pace, setting, tension, and the lives of my characters. I need to let my drawings speak for themselves while also narrating a story that benefits from this interplay of picture and verse…"

"They're told to gather the stories of their parents and grandparents and to honor their cultural history. And yet, as they're born in the United States, they don't identify with Vietnam and feel strongly that these are not their roots, so how can they lose them?"

"I had no idea how lonely it would be to sit in my cave and type, for years and years. I have developed a totally new personality where I talk to myself and play with my hair for entertainment. The surprise is that after much frustration and exhaustion, I do manage to finish a novel."

"Journalism is just very structured…One day I turned in a story and [an editor] said to me, ‘You can’t compare inanimate objects with animate objects,’ and I realized I had to leave."

"Vietnamese is so lyrical, and 80% percent of it is derived from Chinese, which is a language built from pictures not words. So this format and voice came out of that desire."

"My process for making comics for research is very different from fiction and creative nonfiction comics. I studied how groups of young children and graduate students drew together, used drawing to play and pretend together, and drew as a means of creating new knowledge…"

"…The Latino characters that are shown on TV or in movies seem to be pretty one-dimensional. They’re gang members or cleaning stuff in the background. Here’s a college education family that talks about art. That’s not something you see often but it’s real. It’s something that exists. People are like, “That’s so universal!” And I’m like, “Of course it is! What did you think?” It’s a human story. I believe there can be harmony. I believe we can be different and still have that. Hopefully my plays reflect this idea."

"…telenovelas are a populace form of entertainment, and what intrigued me was the idea of taking this form of storytelling and marrying it with high art, as theater is thought of being."

"Coming to the theater humanizes people…Culture informs perspective, and the world is a complicated place. Telling the story on stage increases understanding…"

"…The base of every good play is an unanswerable question. It’d be very pompous of me to say “I have the answer.” But they are a driving questions for me, and how I live my life and I look at the world."

"There is a reason for African Americans to feel a lot of pride. Detroiters faced a lot of obstacles related to home ownership, which was a cornerstone of the American dream, but they achieved it nonetheless."

"It’s important for African Americans to find sources of pride as society turns away from valuing us."

"There were safety issues, the City let the lights remain off in certain areas, and there were no services. I wondered, how did this happen? I was exploring what it feels like to know things are changing and shifting."

"These women, they don't just have deep emotional lives, but they are, you know, thinking about the world. They're thinking about art. They're thinking about things that are bigger than just reactions to circumstances."

"I wanted to think about the beginnings and what it feels like to have a kind of rupture with someone you love, or you grew up loving, and for it to kind of just bloom into this insurmountable distance between the two of you."

"There's something universal about the experience of navigating middle life or into middle life, which is that there are just a lot fewer guideposts."

"You've got to navigate what might feel just completely opaque by yourself in a lot of ways. There are the sort of fellow travelers, but you have to decide what is it going to feel like? What is going to feel satisfactory to you? And that is what I think about when I think about the title, is these women are navigating the wilderness."

"Any realistic depiction of Detroit should include the blight and frustration that come with living there, but it should also show regular people experiencing joy."

"I don’t think I need to succeed so that the race can succeed. We’ve seen that. We’ve been succeeding since we were sneaking to learn how to read. We’ve been showing ourselves to be exceptional, and it doesn’t change anything. I understand that burden; I do not feel that burden. I feel the burden on the page when writing a story to do justice to the black people I am rendering, but I don’t necessarily believe that my successes or failure will have some greater impact on the way that people view black people…"

"Write about whatever random-ass black thing you want to write about. Or not. The only way that our literature will continue to grow is if we accept and acknowledge that nothing we write will change the hearts and minds of people who don’t want their hearts and minds changed…"

"No outside pressure could live up to the pressure I’ve always put on myself as a writer…"

"…I think that was really important growing up around story tellers like my dad and my uncles. I think it instilled a love of the beauty of the spoken story. Also, my mother was a reading teacher. She brought home a lot of fables and fairy tales, which also have an oral tradition behind them. It was a combination of those things that brought me the desire to tell stories, as opposed to a love of the beauty of writing."

"…I pretended I didn't understand Arabic when he spoke to me in public places. Because when I was a younger child, Arabic was a secret code in the family - I think that’s true for a lot of immigrant families. But then I didn't want to speak Arabic. I didn't want to be different from my friends at all…"

"Whether it's 'cause you move away or because your lives are just sort of diverging, you have to keep choosing to be a part of this friendship."

"It’s hard to write too overtly about racism without coming across as heavy-handed or didactic. But if you’re too subtle, there’s the sense that you’re side-stepping the issue. Still, I’ve learned to write about hot button topics in more oblique ways, mostly by looking at people’s “innocent” assumptions about each other…"

"I never intended to write solely about Arab characters, or even primarily about them, but because they were such a big part of my first two novels and my memoir, people reckoned that was my main literary terrain. It wasn’t really a deliberate decision to move away from Arab characters in my later books, but more a desire to paint on a broader canvas, one that was closer to my day-to-day experience."

"The voice tends to come first and then everything else follows. It’s never worked for me to think, here’s a character and they should have this kind of voice, let me try to force that. If I can’t tap into a character’s voice, I can’t really write the character…"

"I was also interested in what it’s like to experience in a really vivid and authentic-seeming way agency and choice in a circumstance that you might later in your life view completely differently, because as much as you were experiencing agency and choice, you were actually in a radically disempowered situation you weren’t even experienced enough to recognize. That’s why I think consent is such a complicated issue."

"I think the “disfigurement” that Japan inflicted was less the idea of disfigurement, and more the idea of mystery. I’ve managed to finish all that I’ve written because there’s always a mystery at the heart of it which keeps me interested. I think that’s why Japan was interesting, and it seems to me, still, like a strange mystery."

"I think that there's every reason for a young woman to feel very strongly that allying herself with a powerful man, regardless of how she has to do it, might be her path forward — might sometimes be her only path forward. And forming that alliance may be a decision she makes when she is less experienced, and a decision that she is able to recognize for how compromised it was later in life, but we still have to recognize that there's this whole baked-in social and cultural structure that's pointing her toward that decision. Just identifying all the "bad men" and putting them into a time-out isn't really going to address the ways in which sexism is baked into our society."

"I often say that medicine seems great if you have a broken arm, but if you end up with some more mysterious ailment, or a confusing autoimmune disorder, then you will become obsessed with the color of the coconut water you drink. The more lost I became in terms of my own health, my own mental illness and chronic illness, whether that was named late-stage Lyme disease or dysautonomia, or whether that was named “the mysterious autoimmune disorder that nobody could figure out,” the more I was searching…"

"I do want to be careful not to glamorise mental illness when it comes to creativity because more often than not it actually tends to inhibit creativity…"

"I believe, behind what’s called “narrative therapy,” which uses storytelling to distance a person from their experiences in order to tell a different story about their lives. Because we often are the life stories that we tell ourselves about who we are; we create the scaffolding that we hang our narratives upon. Is this a treatment? I think so…"

"I think there’s this cult of objectivity in the U.S. about media. There are two sides to every story, but it’s not always objective that one side has as much right to narrate a story. I think it’s distorting to always impose that 50-50 impulse on everything you cover because otherwise you’ll be branded as “liberal” or “having an agenda.” Life is not 50-50…"

"Whether they're drinking wine in the evening or painting something "offensive," Iranians choose not to dwell on the fact that they could receive some seventh-century punishment. Laws are inconsistently enforced, and you can usually pay off police to look the other way."

"I believe their race and religious background shaped the way they were treated by the media… The willingness to blame them even though they were clearly victims was distressing."

"One big difference I’ve noticed is how class is experienced in both places. Even though America is so class-stratified, the idea that there is a national culture that transcends class is really present. In Iran, despite the revolution and its attempt to eliminate class as a category, there’s now political class. That’s different than social class, but it’s still very much infused with the nuance that comes from a class-stratified place."

"I have been taking these photographs as I am dead, and then I look back at these photographs to re-experience what it was like, as someone who experienced themselves as a dead person. And they’re the same. It’s very much the same experience, just one is visual and one is more verbal. Both are ways to get through a very difficult experience, and they’re also ways to remember it."

"As a Rioplatense person of European decent, I feel strongly about the urgency of retelling the stories of our nation’s histories, the Argentinian and Uruguayan national stories and cultural stories, in ways that fully recognize the presence of black people. Which is a huge part of the greater story of the Americas as well. You cannot tell the story of the Americas without the story of black people and the transatlantic slave trade — that mass atrocity. Alongside, of course, the genocide of indigenous people. And also the cultural richness and artistic production and stories of resilience and power that, too, come out of those harsh realities that are at the origin of the Americas."

"We do our characters a disservice by allowing them to be flat. Our role as novelists is to do our best to portray the nuance of a whole range of life experiences. It's one of the things that fiction is uniquely positioned to do, to bring the reader into the interior life of people’s experiences that are wildly different than our own…"

"What I remember and where I start is with the detail that is the equivalent of the punctum, the moment of a life, the shape of an object, the darkness of a room, that solicits me, most often because it represents an opening or a detour."

"At some point, the novelist has to leap head first into the pool of imagination in order to more freely explore the truth."