Women Authors From The United States

"The small and graceful with its solitary pink blossoms was … acquired from with the , often favored for its delicate flowers and heart-shaped leaves. China in turn imported the native Persian vine, , onion, , and and began cultivation of . Called Medice by the Greeks for the lush valleys of where it grew wild, alfalfa was first introduced to Greece when the Persians under carried it there as ."

"The Taj Mahal is an unforgettable visual experience. With every change of light there appear subtle variations in the hue of the luminous ; at times it appears to be a vision."

"is credited with introducing into India the traditionally used by the s as elegant camping groounds. ... Not merely settings for occasional enjoyment, gardens were Babur's preferred residence just as they were for his ancestor (Tamerlane, 1336–1405). The Timurids' inclination for fighting was equaled by their enthusiasm for building, and during the century following Timur's death the forms and ornamenatation of their architecture became ever more refined. The exuberantly tiled, gittering order of and with their green belts of great s were Babur's architectural idea. Several of Timur's residential gardens in Samarqand were described by , the Spanish ambassador to Timur's court. ... Large enclosures with fragrant fourfold gardens, coursing water and brimming pools, plantations of trees with colorful pavilions scattered throughout became a Timurid tradition. Fruit trees were planted in profusion, and , who has writtn with such authority and insight on , relates these Timurid enclosures to the Persian bustan, or . ..."

"In the first century , Roman warriors invaded Persia for power and plunder and were captivated by the s. Following his extended Eastern campaigns, the Roman general, , returned to Rome and retired to the great gardens he built in the Persian style. He had an interest in philosophy, wrote a history, and collected a great library, but he was also . His were so large and costly to build that he was called " in a " by when he saw them. ... Lucullus is credited with introducing the and the to Europe in these gardens."

"Shatter her beauteous breast ye may; The Spirit of England none can slay! Dash the bomb on the dome of Paul's, — Deem ye the fame of the Admiral falls? Pry the stone from the chancel floor, — Dream ye that Shakespeare shall live no more? Where is the giant shot that kills Wordsworth walking the old green hills? Trample the red rose on the ground, — Keats is Beauty while earth spins round! Bind her, grind her, burn her with fire, Cast her ashes into the sea, — She shall escape, she shall aspire, She shall arise to make men free: She shall arise in a sacred scorn, Lighting the lives that are yet unborn; Spirit supernal, splendor eternal, !"

"There has always been something wrong wif the tesses. The tesses paint a picture of me wif no brain. The tesses paint a picture of me an' my muver—my whole family, we more than dumb, we invisible."

"Her eyes came back to Karen's face and fury again seized her. "And as for you, ungrateful girl—perfidious, yes, and insolent one—you deserve to be denounced to the world.""

"the farmer takes Jill down the well & all the king's horses & all the king's men can't put that baby together again crooked man crooked man pumpkin eater childhood stealer."

"These insolent words, hurled at it, convulsed the livid face that fronted Karen. And suddenly, holding Karen's shoulders and leaning forward, Madame von Marwitz broke into tears, horrible tears—in all her life Karen had never pitied her as she pitied her then—sobbing with raking breaths: "No, no; it is too much. Have I not loved him with a saintly love, seeking to uplift what would draw me down? Has he not loved me? Has he not sought to be my lover? And he can spit upon me in the dust!""

""I'm tired," I says. She says, "I know you are, but you can't stop now Precious, you gotta push." And I do."

"death is where jimi hendrix is, where our revolution ended up."

"Karen has many privileges. She must learn not to take, always, the extra inch when the ell is so gladly granted."

"To be a woman and a writer is double mischief, for the world will slight her who slights "the servile house," and who would rather make odes than beds."

"China want desperately to be back in the center of the world. To that end, the leaders want and need something from all of you. The best way to get what they want is to give you what they think you want – to be first, to be special, to be individual. It costs them nothing to give that to you. China understands America better than we understand China."

"The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it."

"[Power is] the ability not to have to please."

"Like their personal lives, women's history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others."

"If there's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, there is nothing more ubiquitously pervasive than an idea whose time won't go."

"I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life, but I am not one of them. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be. It's wonderful to have someone like that around, you always feel you can count on them. You can go away and come back, you can change your mind and your hairdo and your politics, and when you get through doing all these upsetting things, you look around and there they are, just the way they were, just being."

"Ultra-left and reactionary are often used as opposites, but extreme ideologies are never linear – they are circular. They all end up in the same place. Rigid. Sanctimonious. Intolerant."

"Feudalism? Sometimes it referred to the power of an all-mighty Emperor to distribute favors; sometimes it referred to peasants who had no land or power; sometimes it referred to a hierarchy of obligations and duties; sometimes it referred to the old thinking where women were subjugated to men."

"I am not sure how many "sins" I would recognize in the world. Some would surely be defused by changed circumstances. But I can imagine none that is more irredeemably siinful than the betrayal, the exploitation, of the young by those who should care for them."

"Philosophically, incest asks a fundamental question of our shifting mores: not simply what is normal and what is deviant, but whether such a thing as deviance exists at all in human relationships if they seem satisfactory to those who share them."

"I can remember...the surprise of animals, not only the pretty mare...but animals in and out, cats and dogs and a milk goat and chickens and guinea hens, all taken for granted, as if man was intended to live on terms of friendly intercourse with the rest of creation instead of huddling in isolation on the fourteenth floor of an apartment house in a city where animals occurred behind bars in the zoo."

"Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections?"

"In this nadir of poetic repute, when the only verse that most people read from one year's end to the next is what appears on greeting cards, it is well for us to stop and consider our poets...It is ourselves that we are hurting by our stupidity and ignorance of poetry, much more than the poets. Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization. But our sodden and lumpish society prefers to lie unleavened and unchanged by the ferment of poetry."

"Sex cannot be contained within a definition of physical pleasure, it cannot be understood as merely itself for it has stood for too long as a symbol of profound connection between human beings."

"Some cultural anthropologists posit that Westerners do the right thing to avoid feeling guilty, and Asians do the right thing to avoid feeling shame. If correct, it would explain the deeply ingrained aversion to a loss of face among Chinese people, as shame, unlike guilt, implies the public knows about the act."

"Physically the Low Country retains its glamorous air under the scourings and sweepings of industrial change. 'Down on the salt,' as they say, the sea-islands still offer their long, palmetto-fringed beaches and their wide green marshes to the enormous sky. A little way inland the dense woods hung with grey Spanish moss, the nostalgic ruins of plantation houses destroyed by war or fire, the cypress pools of clear black water in which the herons stand like fabulous white blooms on their stalks — these trappings of the Gothic romances have their old power to stir the imagination."

"Augustus sat hunched on the sofa, strangely shrunken; even the Charvet dressing gown had an air of ruin."

"The memory of one who is taken into the heart of a little child is kept forever green."

"At the top of most lists of good behavior is honesty. Boys are keenly attuned to honesty in those around them. And they feel it immediately when people around them sway from it. If a boy has a strong conscience, his eyebrows, nostrils, hairline, and mouth will all betray him if he tries to lie, because he will know he is breaking the code of conduct. Boys consider honesty a masculine quality, so to betray it is to be less of a man. Heroes, in a boy's eyes, are deserving of honor because they stand for what is right and just, and what is right and just is honesty.Living honestly feels better to boys than living with deception, even if that deception is meant to get them what they want. Boys like feeling strong and courageous, and telling the truth demands strength and honesty. Lying feels grungy. Lying makes boys fearful because they know it is a weakness. The liar is someone who is afraid of the truth.This is why boys are so open to being trained to tell the truth. They know that if you teach them to be truth tellers, you're teaching them to be strong. They know good boys, internally strong boys, tell the truth; wishy-washy boys lie. No one needs to tell them this; they know it. So in teaching honesty you have a ready audience. Don't blow it by encouraging your son to tell white lies — even if they're well intentioned. Young boys think in black-and-white terms. A statement is either true or it is false. The younger the boy, the less gray he feels in his thinking. When a parent coaxes him to tell "white lies" he is confused. The term is an oxymoron. In order to accommodate his parents' wishes, he puts lies into the pool of acceptable speech. Beginning such ambiguous training so early on in life leads boys down a slippery path."

"Every boy needs schooling in virtues in order to become a great man. And any parent can school him because at the heart of virtue is masculine intuition. Parents don't have to construct the virtues and then pour then into the heart of their son. The virtues are there, but in small fragments that must be cleaned, shaped, and polished.The great burden for parents is finding time. Haste is the enemy of virtue, because it gives us no time to discuss, think, wonder, or pray; it forces us to push our boys to perform when we should be working with them. Give time back to your son. Give him time to dream. Encourage him to question and to think. Boys must have time to think upon virtues before they embrace them. Otherwise, virtues become nothing more than a disposable outer layer of clothing. A man can put them on or off, depending on his mood. But real virtues are not so disposable — they become part of the boy."

"Boys will search for virtue, just as they will search for truth and self-worth, because in the heart of a developing boy is the desire to know the truth, to know what is good, and to know that he has some reason to do the right thing. This is why boys are famous for setting out rules, standards of conduct for themselves. They derive their moral code from those they admire (usually their parents). Once a boy sets out his rules, he holds them as the best and highest way a boy (himself) should behave. If a boy succeeds in following his code of conduct, he's able to respect himself, and he believes others will respect him as well. Respect and honor are important to boys (and men)."

"Sadly for all of us, our culture does little to encourage boys to become great men. Television depicts men as stupid, or as sex addicts, and almost always intellectually and emotionally shallow. Men don't seem to care about these depictions, merely laughing them off. But I care about them, because our sons need good role models and given the amount of time boys spend with electronic media they need good role models on television. And of course, there is a bigger cultural fallout from the depreciation of masculinity and fatherhood, which is lower marriage rates, higher divorce rates, and the reality that many boys grow up in fatherless homes.This is a national tragedy, because boys need healthy encouragement from their fathers more than they need it from anyone else. In a boy's eyes, his father's words are sacred. They hold enormous power. His words can crush a boy or piece him back together after a fall. If a father is not there at all, there is a huge void in a boy's life — and as the depressing statistics remind us, boys who grow up without fathers are at a dramatically greater risk of drug abuse, alcohol abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, and ending up in prison.Encouragement from a father changes a boy's life. His words can ignite furious passion in a boy that will help him achieve any goal he sets out to accomplish. To a son, a dad's words are the final truth. If they are positive, a boy feels that he cannot be beaten; if they are negative, however, a son feels that he could never win. If you are a son reading this, you know exactly what I mean."

"No amount of past oppression can justify women's oppression of the most vulnerable among us."

"this country might have been a pio neer land once. but. there ain't no mo indians blowing custer's mind with a different image of america."

"Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church, or robbing a bank, but never to being bores."

"At the heart of her doubts about secular liberalism (and what she described as "radical, upscale feminism") was its embrace of abortion and its (continuing) dalliance with euthanasia. At first, she went along with abortion, albeit reluctantly, believing that women's rights to develop their talents and control their destinies required its legal availability. But Betsey (as she was known by her friends) was not one who could avert her eyes from inconvenient facts. The central fact about abortion is that it is the deliberate killing of a developing child in the womb. For Betsey, euphemisms such as "products of conception," "termination of pregnancy," "privacy," and "choice" ultimately could not hide that fact. She came to see that to countenance abortion is not to respect women's "privacy" or liberty; it is to suppose that some people have the right to decide whether others will live or die."

"What is a bore? Maxwell definition: a vacuum cleaner of society, sucking up everything and giving nothing. How do you spot one? Bores are always eager to be seen talking to you."

"Bores put you in a mental cemetery while you are still walking."

"Some say a cavalry corps, some infantry, some, again, will maintain that the swift oars of our fleet are the finest sight on dark earth; but I say that whatever one loves, is."

"Dapple-throned Aphrodite, eternal daughter of God, snare-knitter!"

"Like a hyacinth in the mountains, trampled by shepherds until only a purple stain remains on the ground."

"Hesperus, you herd homeward whatever Dawn’s light dispersedYou herd sheep—herd goats—herd children home to their mothers."

"I wanted to hear Sappho’s laughter and the speech of her stringed shell.What I heard was whiskered mumble- ment of grammarians:Greek pterodactyls and Victorian dodos."

"Conservation is humanity caring for the future."

"The wilderness holds answers to more questions than we yet know how to ask."

"Success did come to me later, but that was okay, I could feel myself getting better with each story or book. Age does matter to me — but that doesn’t mean it has to matter to all writers. It matters to me because as I age my work gets better, but more importantly, I live through more things and see more things, and therefore have more things to say."

"There’s a part of me in every I write, whether it’s male or female, because everything has to go through me. Everything I’ve observed or heard or whatever—it all has to go through me. I’m the one who makes these people up, and so there’s a part of me in some form in all of these people, but I really have made them up. But they’re so real to me, you know? By the time I’m done with them on the page, they’re very, very real to me. They’re just as real to me as anybody that I’ve ever met."