Poets From The United States

"No one is beat till he quits, No one is through till he stops, No matter how hard Failure hits, No matter how often he drops, A fellow's not down till he lies In the dust and refuses to rise."

"I'd like to be the sort of friend that you have been to me; I'd like to be the help that you've been always glad to be; I'd like to mean as much to you each minute of the day as you have meant, old friend of mine, to me along the way."

"Life is a jest; Take the delight of it. Laughter is best; Sing through the night of it. Swiftly the tear And the hurt and the ache of it Find us down here; Life must be what we make of it."

"I sought out clandestine affairs of my own, which wasn't hard in a Mexican community, where it's possible to be a fag and not a fag. Men satisfy their urges secretly, confident that their public sexuality displaces any suspicion or speculation about their private one."

"Their beloved priest must now wander for all eternity chained to this earthly purgatory—a warning to all that God forgives only that which is confessed to Him through true repentance and atonement. I walked down the church steps, keeping my secret stitched to my tongue. After the ceremony I would have no one to answer for my yearnings but myself, even if after my death I would have to lag behind that priest until the end of days, a pair of branded souls dragging the heavy burdens of their sins, like cows roaming the foggiest dawns, the first guiding the second with its dangling rosary of a tail."

"My four years of high school were spent locked up inside “el campo.” I became a voracious reader and television-watcher, keeping to myself at such alarming extremes that I became invisible. My invisibility provided the perfect protection against harm of any sort. I walked to and from school past the gangsters as silently as a breeze, so disassociated from their tattoos and lingo that even they couldn't find a place for me in their lines of vision."

"After a while the other students in class began to notice I had become Ms. Burnett's favorite, but no one resented me for it. I was the shy, quiet kid in the back who had arrived from México a few years before and who turned out to be an accomplished speller. I became the school Spelling Bee champion, beating out the eighth graders as well, with the word “lapidary.”"

"In high school the approaching graduation was stirring up excitement among the seniors. I didn't care much for any of it since I couldn't afford any of the mementoes or activities offered for completing the four years. I had not attended the prom or the senior trip, had not purchased a class ring or letterman's jacket or the yearbook—had not even taken my senior portrait—and I wasn't about to attend the ceremony we had been rehearsing all week."

"I had flings with married men or men with girlfriends, with men who had children, sometimes as old as I was. They went to church on Sunday, drank beer, and eyed the teenage girls in gym shorts. They appreciated a good woman-on-woman porno. They showed me photographs of their fiancées and sent me wedding invitations."

"I know what he means: the taste of language that is only spoken and never written because the speaker most likely doesn't read or write. My father has it, too."

"Most memorable was the day before the mass, at confession."

"Funerals in México are also about drowning sorrow with liquor. The coffee is spiked with tequila"

"I think, How clever time works, overlapping people's lives at certain stages, and as some eyes are waking up, others are already closing, securing the continuity of the world. My mother and I were connected for twelve years. She also lived during a time I didn't exist. And I, in turn, must now keep living when she does not. And yet my father, who still shares the same wheel of time, is more like my parallel line."

"All the things we hide in water Hoping we won't see them go. Forests growing under water Press against the ones we know."

"Loss of sincerity is loss of vital power."

"It is a barren kind of criticism which tells you what a thing is not."

"At all events, the next best thing to being witty one's self, is to be able to quote another's wit."

"The scope of an intellect is not to be measured with a tape-string, or a character deciphered from the shape or length of a nose."

"The great obstacle to progress is prejudice."

"Melancholy sees the worst of things,—things as they may be, and not as they are. It looks upon a beautiful face, and sees but a grinning skull."

"The first step toward greatness is to be honest, says the proverb; but the proverb fails to state the case strong enough. Honesty is not only "the first step toward greatness," — it is greatness itself."

"Four sweet lips, two pure souls, and one undying affection,—these are love's pretty ingredients for a kiss."

"He has but one great fear that fears to do wrong."

"A book should be luminous but not voluminous."

"There is probably no hell for authors in the next world — they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this."

"Loose ideas on the subject of business will not answer. It must be reduced to something of a science. It has its principles, upon a knowledge and an application of which, success in it mainly depends."

"Formerly when great fortunes were only made in war, war was a business; but now, when great fortunes are only made by business, business is war."

"The light in the world comes principally from two sources,—the sun, and the student's lamp."

"What a man knows should find its expression in what he does. The value of superior knowledge is chiefly in that it leads to a performing manhood."

"Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and insensibly approximate to the characters we most admire. In this way, a generous habit of thought and of action carries with it an incalculable influence."

"There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate."

"It is the passion that is in a kiss that gives to it its sweetness; it is the affection in a kiss that sanctifies it."

"Perhaps no man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions, it may be said, are as necessary to our happiness as realities."

"The language denotes the man. A coarse or refined character finds its expression naturally in a coarse or refined phraseology."

"Patience is only one faculty; earnestness the devotion of all the faculties. Earnestness is the cause of patience; it gives endurance, overcomes pain, strengthens weakness, braves dangers, sustains hope, makes light of difficulties, and lessens the sense of weariness in overcoming them."

""There is nothing," says a correspondent of the New York Times, "which the business world discards as unpractical and useless so much as the quiet, thinking scholar. But this is the man who makes revolutions. Politicians are mere puppets in the hands of men of thought."

"Leslie Marmon Silko's writing takes us into old worlds of consciousness inside the present, and inside ourselves."

"From Leslie Silko we hear, perhaps for the first time, the voice of contemporary Indian America rising above dull anthropological reports"

"a brilliant novelist."

"It's simply splendid, and I can't stress too much how happy I am to have this book in the world."

"Leslie Silko's Ceremony is an extraordinary novel, if indeed 'novel' is the right word. It is more precisely a telling, the celebration of a tradition and form that are older and more nearly universal than the novel as such...Her talent is real and remarkable."

"in the last five years, the works of Leslie Marmon Silko have had a great impact on me. I feel that there are connections that she is making in terms of a kind of writing that we have to do to counter the death dealings of a Euro-American monoculture. She is also a wonderful storyteller, so I find courage in that kind of writing and being able to have that kind of worldview that is based on her own indigenism. I feel that we Chicanas could be drawing from that source much more than we are. I find her very inspiring."

"Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead is an extraordinary book, a work of immense creative power...a landmark in Native American literature-the Indian War and Peace."

"She was a discovery for me in a particular way I don't think any other writer will ever be. I'm very attached to her work."

"True" representation is representation as best as possible. (Absolutely true representation is not possible because it is always only representation.) Then we can circumvent our own stereotype and, in a sense, not indulge in stereotyping. And I think that will produce better literature, and surprising literature, too. (To the Western mind this is the main thing in society.) And I think in a sense that Leslie Silko has done that; certainly, the stereotypes are not there."

"Leslie Marmon Silko writes in her collection of essays, Yellow Woman and the Beauty of the Spirit, about "The Indian with a Camera." Silko grew up at Laguna Pueblo, and tourists have been pointing cameras at her all of her life, in one case, taking Leslie, who is mixed blood, out of a photo because she didn't look Indian enough. As an adult, Silko, who wrote novels such as Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead," and most recently, Gardens in the Dunes, is also a photographer. She said that this makes the tourists really uncomfortable. Why? Because she, as an artist, is turning her gaze on them. Indians are supposed to be the passive receivers of their gaze. The implications of an Indian turning her gaze, her sensibilities, on them, capturing their images, is a subversion, a reversal of the given order."

"I read Almanac of the Dead, and here were these ideas, these stories, this understanding of the relationship of the people of the SW to the land, and the immateriality of the political border to traditional cultures. It was not written to flatter or beguile. She did not pull any punches. It was written to show these connections between the seen and the unseen, the past and the future. By talking about the Yaqui, who live on both sides of the border, she highlighted another culture, like the Opata, who have claims that supersede current boundaries. It was a great relief to find her work."

"The work of women of color arises out of the creative void in a multitude of voices, a complex of modes, and most of these women are quite aware of their connection to the dark grandmother of human wisdom...Leslie Marmon Silko reaches into unexplored realms, the gloom of what is long forgotten but that continues to nourish our love and our terror"

"I've always liked her work, and especially admire Ceremony."

"(How do you relate to the women's movement?) S: I feel I've benefited by it just generally in the sense that anything that undermines the stereotypes perpetrated on all of us by white men is helpful. What it does is take some of the pressure off those of us who have never lived very close to the stereotypes. I've always been the way I was. Here at Laguna, a lot more is expected of women; women are expected to be strong, to manage the property. Children belong to women and to their families. Women do the plastering. It's a relief to have the stereotypes knocked down. It's just made it easier for me to do what I want to do."