Women Authors From The United States

"The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education."

"The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you’re having one, it is somehow not obvious to you."

"That’s all that was left of the life I’d had here: a puzzle whose rules I would never understand, because they were not rules at all but a kind of cage meant to enclose me. I could stay, and search for what had been home, or I could go, now, before the walls shifted and the way out was shut."

"By the end of the semester the world felt big, and it was hard to imagine returning to the mountain, to a kitchen, or even to a piano in the room next to the kitchen. This caused a kind of crisis in me. My love of music, and my desire to study it, had been compatible with my idea of what a woman is. My love of history and politics and world affairs was not. And yet they called to me."

"I searched my mind and discovered a new conviction there: I would never be a plural wife. A voice declared this with unyielding finality; the declaration made me tremble. What if God commanded it? I asked. You wouldn’t do it, the voice answered. And I knew it was true."

"I decided to experiment with normality."

"You were my child. I should have protected you. I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who remembered a different childhood. I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time."

"Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure."

"I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money."

"When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?"

"We had been bruised and gashed and concussed, had our legs set on fire and our heads cut open. We had lived in a state of alert, a kind of constant terror, our brains flooding with cortisol because we knew that any of those things might happen at any moment. Because Dad always put faith before safety. Because he believed himself right, and he kept on believing himself right—after the first car crash, after the second, after the bin, the fire, the pallet. And it was us who paid."

"I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward."

"To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s."

"My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs."

"Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me."

"Fine, we’re all against anti-Semitism... We fought against anti-Semitism for years in that context of fighting against white supremacy and racism. But this isn’t about what she (Ilhan Omar) said... It’s about the fact that she is a Muslim African immigrant, a Somali refugee, who is talking about Palestinian rights, who is talking about the power of the Israel lobby, and the big pharma lobby, and the lobby for fossil fuels. And that’s not OK... And that’s why she’s facing death threats."

"We’re seeing an extraordinary level of engagement because what the pro-Israel lobby has been facing for the last... eight years, is the beginnings... of a generational split, where young people, particularly young Jews–and particularly progressive young Jews, Democrats who are young Jews – do not have the same assumption about their support for Israel that you and I did growing up. We all assume that if you’re Jewish, you support Israel... Now that’s no longer the case... They... can be part of the biggest organization in the Jewish community these days in terms of how fast it’s growing, Jewish Voice for Peace, that supports rights of Palestinians."

"The flurry of favors the president did for Bibi could constrain US policy—and hurt people in the region—for a long time."

"The irony was that if Dad was bipolar—or had any of a dozen disorders that might explain his behavior—the same paranoia that was a symptom of the illness would prevent its ever being diagnosed and treated. No one would ever know."

"Public opinion polls show that Americans really do want to end these endless wars. But too many people in power—from mainstream media editorial writers to elected officials at every level, especially Democrats—ignore that reality, and end up focusing more on Trump’s fake words than on his real actions..."

"Right now, we should have broad, deep, and vibrant movements across this country challenging US support for Saudi Arabia’s ongoing massacre of civilians in Yemen. We should see teach-ins on every campus and in every house of worship on the threat of a US war against Iran resulting from Trump’s rejection of diplomacy and abandonment of the nuclear deal. And we should be cheering as every progressive social movement—supporting everything from the Green New Deal to Medicare for All to free college education to a new jobs program—is demanding that the bloated military budget be slashed to pay for those big-idea projects."

"The seed of curiosity had been planted; it needed nothing more than time and boredom to grow."

"One of the things about [John Bolton]] that I think is so crucially important is his absolute, consistent commitment to militarism. This is a man who does not believe in diplomacy anywhere. He does not believe there are any international crises that can be solved by anything other than direct military intervention, whether it’s sending troops, whether it’s bombing. His op-ed in The Wall Street Journal calling for a first strike against North Korea; his consistent years of calling for bombing Iran; his calls for regime change in Venezuela; most recently, of course, his opposition to even negotiating with the Taliban in Afghanistan, let alone a partial, small-scale troop withdrawal — all of this is of a piece. All of this is a consistent position that says, “America first means America military first and only.”"

"Trying to suppress criticism of Israel even as Israel’s government becomes ever more repressive of Palestinian rights won’t work, especially when the White House itself is surrounded by anti-Semitism. Jewish and other progressive student groups are already asserting their intention to fight against the denial of free speech. Likewise, insisting that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism doesn’t make it true. A new generation of young Jews — and a whole bunch of us who aren’t so young anymore — know that’s wrong."

"The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand."

"I began to study trigonometry. There was solace in its strange formulas and equations. I was drawn to the Pythagorean theorem and its promise of a universal—the ability to predict the nature of any three points containing a right angle, anywhere, always. What I knew of physics I had learned in the junkyard, where the physical world often seemed unstable, capricious. But here was a principal through which the dimensions of life could be defined, captured. Perhaps reality was not wholly volatile. Perhaps it could be explained, predicted. Perhaps it could be made to make sense."

"I don’t know how long I sat there reading about it, but at some point I’d read enough. I leaned back and stared at the ceiling. I suppose I was in shock, but whether it was the shock of learning about something horrific, or the shock of learning about my own ignorance, I’m not sure."

"Suspended between fear of the past and fear of the future, I recorded the dream in my journal. Then, without any explanation, as if the connection between the two were obvious, I wrote, I don’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to get a decent education as a child."

"By the end of it, I had finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had to be wrested."

"If you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever closed your legs to a man you loved opened them for one you didn't moved against a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach seaweed clinging to your ankles paid good money for a bad haircut backed away from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled into the back seat for lack of a tampon if you swam across a river under rain sang using a dildo for a microphone stayed up to watch the moon eat the sun entire ripped out the stitches in your heart because why not if you think nothing & no one can / listen I love you joy is coming"

"Angels in the house always die in the books they preside over because early ascension into heaven is their reward—and because their goodness makes them boring."

"Such is the power of words, of writing, of books. Words you loved and will always yearn for. They can inspire you with possibilities you otherwise would have never imagined; they can fill your head with misleading fantasies. They can give you back your seemingly seamless past and place it right alongside your chaotic present. “But that only happens in books,” my mother, pretty much immune to the power of the written word, would say. Exactly. That’s why I can’t stop reading them."

"As I reread these Catholic autobiographies and novels, their odd pridefulness became clearer to me. Much of the Catholic juvenilia I so dearly remembered preached a cover story of self-denial along with a covert sermon about the spiritual and worldly superiority that would result from this self-denial. Writhe and shine."

"Now, given the consumer-pleasing politics of today’s universities, I have, in effect, seventy new bosses each semester; they’re sitting at the desks in front of me. If a teacher is not entertaining or lenient enough and her teaching evaluations plummet, she could lose the job."

"“Mr. Wonderful isn’t just going to knock on the door,” a girlfriend once said, chiding me. “Why not?” I thought. That’s the way people often meet in books—effortlessly, without guile or strategizing."

"The thing that mattered most in this elite new world of mine was brainpower—or, at least, the projection of brainpower. Being a decent, truthful, charitable person—none of those traditional Judeo-Christian virtues counted. Wit, verbal adroitness, a substantive intellectual background (or at least the illusion of one), and condescension toward one’s mental inferiors were the marks of distinction here. Theory, with its bizarre vocabulary of literary encryption, was just beginning to take root at Penn and other top graduate schools across the land."

"I don’t believe in identity politics in literature—or in life much, either. Indeed the current scholarly enchantment with identity politics strikes me as a more intellectual version of the warning oft heard around Sunnyside when I was growing up: “Stick with your own kind.” Family and cultural origins are crucial to self-definition, but they’re not the end of the story. I certainly don’t think that we readers only or even chiefly enjoy or understand books whose main characters mirror us. In fact, the opportunity to become who we are decidedly not—whether it’s Amis’s Dixon or Philip Roth’s Portnoy or Ellison’s Invisible Man or Kafka’s beetle—is one of the greatest gifts reading offers. Women readers get to serve on that floating boy’s club, the Pequod; male readers get to step into Elizabeth Bennet’s shoes and teach Mr. Darcy the dance of humility; readers of either gender who are not African American get to crawl toward freedom alongside Toni Morrison’s Sethe. One of the most magical and liberating things about literature is that it can transport us readers into worlds totally unlike our own."

"Books just don’t register with this crowd. They think I lack common sense; I think they lack a part of their souls."

"As Richard Rodriguez points out in his beautiful and incisive memoir Hunger of Memory, when academics now talk on about race, class, and gender, what they’re usually talking about is race and gender."

"We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our own life stories and—equally important—to find ourselves by understanding our own life stories more clearly in the context of others’."

"As someone from our adoption agency said to us before we left, “You may have been waiting for your daughter for a long time, but she has not been waiting for you.”"

"It’s weird to make oneself one’s “field,” but lots of academics these days are doing it—industriously promoting their own race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and/or religion as their intellectual specialty. Once of the many drawbacks of this “I teach what I am” approach is that it stifles classroom discussion. Any disagreement with the professor’s expertise comes off as an ad hominem attack."

"The best Dorothy Parker-like riposte to nosy questions about adoption was uttered by a friend of a friend of mine on a New York City bus. This white mother and her Chinese baby daughter were riding up Madison Avenue when an older woman got on, sat down across from them, and barked out: “Is her father Chinese?” “I don’t know,” the mother replied. “It was dark.”"

"In our daily lives, where we’re bombarded by the fake and the trivial, reading serves as a way to stop, shut out the noise of the world, and try to grab hold of something real, no matter how small."

"I think, consciously or not, what we readers do each time we open a book is to set off on a search for authenticity. We want to get closer to the heart of things, and sometimes even a few good sentences contained in an otherwise unexceptional book can crystallize vague feelings, fleeting physical sensations, or, sometimes, profound epiphanies."

"Jane has learned that there is a fate more terrible than solitude: it’s solitude in the company of a husband who essentially misunderstands you."

"The answer to the whodunit of why work was dumped as the novel’s main subject had to do with centuries of theorizing about the function of art intersecting with the dawning of modern capitalism. From Plato onward, philosophers and poets insisted that art should enlighten and elevate. Art has always belonged to the realm of freedom, while work, particularly at the close of the eighteenth century, moved further and further into the realm of necessity. Industrial capitalism made work an even less appealing focus for art because it changed the very nature of work by divorcing the head from the hand. The development of the novel paralleled this split by delving deeper into the head and caring less about what the hand was doing. The public and private spheres also became more rigidly separated under industrial capitalism: the mill was where people had to go for a certain number of hours every day in order to make a living; but that by-product of work—a living—was consumed at home. Storytellers, always on the lookout for a good time, found the private sphere much more diverting that they did the cramped and coerced public sphere of work."

"It's a very strange time of life. I go on a lot of long walks. I stopped watching television for a year so I wouldn't avoid my feelings. All I read are self-help books. And when I go to parties, I corner divorced people and badger them for details about what this was like for them and how they got through it. Divorce is like my own personal disaster porn."

"My whole life I had done my best to uphold those rigid tenets—I believed obedience would get me what I thought I wanted: a temple marriage to another Mormon...And then it really hit me: I wasn't a virgin anymore. That part of my identity was gone, and I had to face the fact that, at 28, I had no idea who I was...And though I'm still struggling with my faith (and hadn't told my parents the news before publishing this essay forced me to!), I'm the same Elna I've always been. Now I realize that those were just things I made up to scare myself, to keep me from having to deal with the real questions of what was happening in my life. I don't regret losing my virginity, but I also don't regret waiting. I know now that it's a very personal journey."

"I also hear another reassuring voice. Someday Elna, it says, you will look around the room at your husband and children and the rich, full life you've built for yourself. And you will be so proud of the choices you've made. That's the voice I'm listening to."