Historical Novelists

"The three billion crawl about, all over the helpless earth, destroying and defiling, killing the forests, polluting the air with smoke and radioactive dust and the torturing noises of the machine. In place of meadows, filling stations. The lakes are puddles of human filth. Two years ago the whole area of San Francisco Harbor was covered with dead fish: even the ocean is sick from the human taint, and this they call progress."

"Haven’t you stopped to wonder why men want a scapegoat? What is it, what was it ever, but a device to help them avoid looking at themselves?"

"Their door closed; presently she cried out in that desired pain that is brief release from trouble."

"If you’re interested in ethics, you could do worse than think in terms of geological time."

"“Propaganda is bad art.” “Aren’t you thinking in terms of music, though?” “No. In music the problem just doesn’t exist. You don’t even start looking for propaganda in music unless your head’s already addled.” “Yes, but in art—well, Daumier, Goya, Hogarth—” “They live,” said Sharon, “because they were good artists. If their social ideas had been the kind we don’t happen to like in the twentieth century, their work would last just the same. Cellini was a louse. The piety of Blake and El Greco almost doesn’t exist nowadays. Their work does.”"

"I learned some years back that human nature is volatile stuff in a world full of lighted matches."

"After three and a half centuries I have found, for an empirical ethics, no better starting axiom than this: cruelty and evil are virtually synonyms. Human ethical teachers have insisted over the ages that a cruel act is an evil act, and men on the whole endorse the doctrine no matter how repeatedly they violate it. There is inevitable revulsion against any blatant attempt to make cruelty a law of behavior."

"You never meet anything mean or cruel in music. I’d like to be able to play Bach before they they blow up the world. I’d like to be at the keyboard when they do it."

"“I wonder,” said Abraham, “if I’d ever think I knew enough to act.” “If you don’t, then study all your life and talk a little when you believe you have something to say.”"

"I see them as they are. There’s no truth in them. They project the wishes of a little greedy ape against the blank of eternity, and call it truth—there’s triviality if you like. They invent a larger ape somewhat beyond the clouds,—or somewhat beyond the Galaxy, which is the same thing—and call it God; they use this invention as an authority, to justify every vice of cruelty or greed or vanity or lust that their small minds can imagine. They talk of justice, and say that their laws derive from a sense of justice (which they have never defined); but no human law ever derived from anything except fear—fear of the unknown, the different, the difficult, fear of man’s own self. They make war, not for any of the noisy noble reasons they produce, but simply because they hate themselves almost as much as they hate their neighbors. They gibber of love, love, but human love is merely one more projection of the ape-self, superimposed on the invented image of another person."

"She likes to talk, but her mill often shuts off suddenly, because of a quality of hers which I find good as well as rare: I mean that when she has no more to say she doesn’t go on talking."

"“You have to fight back. Can’t afford not to, with your intelligence. People hate intelligence, didn’t you know?” “Depends on what it does to ’em, doesn’t it?” “Not so much, Angelo. Dream up a new gadget, they’ll be grateful for a while,” said Feuermann’s voice. “It’ll be only the gadget they love, not the brain that made it—that they fear. They may have enough superstitious dread to worship it—devil-worship—but never will they respect it except superstitiously.”"

"I notice men themselves have never invented a god capable of understanding them."

"“Faith,” she said gently. “But, Will darling, I just never have seen any of the mountains they say it moved.”"

"Namir would know all the uses of scandal and innuendo and half-truths. Strange weapons, so easy to take up, the stain indelible on user and victim."

"In intelligent life, human or Martian, maybe there has always been a genuine division between those who honor the individuality of others and those who are driven to control and pervert it."

"Human beings have never been very adult about cleaning up after themselves."

"They measure rank as Mussolini did, by the amount of carpet between door and desk."

"“And where is your guarantee against war in that, Miles?” “There can’t be any except in human ethical maturity. A sensible political structure would help enormously, but there’s going to be risk of war so long as men think they can justify hating strangers and grabbing for power. Human hearts and minds are basic—the rest is mechanics.”"

"Maybe the schools have come to regard education as a sort of by-product, something it would be nice to have if it isn’t too much trouble."

"In politics, wishful thinking just gives the wolves a license to howl."

"A justifiable expense, Drozma, if only to let Angelo discover the woods—at any rate I have been in most of the temples and cathedrals of the world, and the peace I sometimes found in them was never more than a small substitute for what there is under the arches of the leaves."

"They never seemed to want to teach her anything except how to be like everybody else. When she finished—bright, you know, nothing stupid about Clara—she could add a column of figures after a fashion, read a little if she had to. Hated books, still does. Always been a heavy reader myself, be lost nowadays if I wasn’t. Damned if I know what she did learn. Self-expression before she could have anything to express. Social consciousness, whatever that is, when even now she hasn’t enough command of language to tell you what she thinks society is. Scraps of this and that, no logic to hold ’em together. Everything made easy—and how are you going to make education easy? You might as well try to build an athlete by keeping him in a hammock with cream puffs and beer."

"I already knew that Max’s type of messianic enterprise is a gold mine. The legions of the lonely, the mentally and emotionally starved, the bewildered and resentful, the angry daydreamers—who of them wouldn’t chip in five or ten dollars to buy a substitute for God, or Mom, or Big Brother, or the New Jerusalem?"

"Yet good is the drink, evil only a poison that is sometimes in the dregs: in the course of living we are likely to shake the glass—no fault of the wine. It is good to sit quiet in the sun: there is no nicely balanced opposing evil to that. Where is there any matching evil to a hearing of the G Minor Fugue? As absurd as asking, What is the opposite of a tree?"

"A crisis passed usually means another one approached."

"Patience is a narcotic for the weak."

"I’ve watched human beings fool around with love. Love of self mostly, but also love of place, work, ideas; love of friends, of male and female, parent and child. I can’t think of any human illusions more comic than those of love."

"One would think that the mere shortness of life would be a reminder that to destroy beauty is to destroy one’s own self too."

"One doesn’t look for the small promises of an ethical revolution in the headlines: the ocean’s currents do not derive from the ocean’s tempests."

"With me and my queer nature, that set me so at odds with the world and all its ordinary rules, I could not find a place in it to live and be content."

"They will turn my passion into something gross and wrong... It is only love, Helenonly that."

"What the world thought made little difference. Rembrandt had to paint. Whether he painted well or badly didn’t matter; painting was the stuff that held him together as a man. The chief value of art, Vincent, lies in the expression it gives to the artist. Rembrandt fulfilled what he knew to be his life purpose; that justified him. Even if his work had been worthless, he would have been a thousand times more successful than if he had put down his desire and become the richest merchant in Amsterdam."

"My father would have loved this book as Mr. Keith interviewed every person who was important in Dad's life and then wove their memories of him into a story that is timeless and easily read."

"Harold Keith won the 1958 John Newbery Medal for his Rifles for Watie, a young adult novel about the Civil War. The Oklahoma native received a master's degree in history from the University of Oklahoma and became the university's first sports publicity director. He remained at OU for thirty-nine years, introducing many innovations to that office and establishing himself as an institution in the field. In 1951 he received the Helms Foundation Award as outstanding sports publicity director in the nation. Keith was the author of sixteen books, as well as a noted historian, long distance runner, and barber shop quartet singer. In 1997 Keith was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Oklahoma Center for the Book. Just before the publication of Chico & Dan, Mr. Keith died at the age of ninety-four."

"We are grateful to Mr. Keith for writing this wonderful story of the childhood of Will Rogers and for consenting to have it reprinted. Since the research was done in 1936, Keith was able to personally interview the folks who knew my father best and that makes this biography truly unique. We are especially glad this book will again be in schools and libraries so that it can be read and enjoyed by generations who were not lucky enough to know my Dad."

"A glad look came into the old man's eyes. "Throw yore gear right thar in thet south bedroom," he invited, pointing to its door. "It's all yores," he added. "Purty cool in thar. You can look out the west window into the pony pasture an' see yore hoss. Then come on in the dinin' room. Tonia's gittin' supper ready.""

"They went outside to watch the new day dawn. Although the land lay hidden in dark shadow, the tops of the river cottonwoods glowed with a fiery beauty. Yellow leaves floated down the ebony surface of the river. All around them the hundreds of tipis sat dewy and still, their occupants slumbering. They reminded Pedro of ducks on a pond, heads under their wings. Even the dogs slept. Sound carried tenfold in the cool, dry air. A man with a rope in his hands was walking solitary and silent to the herding grounds to tend to his horses. Although he was almost an arrow shoot away, the gentle thup, thup, thup of his moccasins striking the frosty buffalo grass carried plainly to their ears. Together, they watched the dull lodge skins on their tipi assume an orange cast. Pedro thought, few things are prettier than the east side of a tipi at dawn."

"Harold Keith grew up near the Cherokee country he describes in Rifles for Watie. A native Oklahoman, he was educated at Northwestern State Teachers College at Alva and at the University of Oklahoma, where he was a long distance runner. While traveling in eastern Oklahoma doing research on his master's thesis in history, Mr. Keith found a great deal of fresh, unused material about the Civil War in the Indian country. Deciding he might someday write a historical novel about it, he interviewed twenty-two Civil War veterans then living in Oklahoma and Arkansas; and much of the background of Rifles for Watie came from the notebooks he filled at the time. The actual writing of this book took five years. Since 1930, the author has been sports publicity director at the University of Oklahoma, famous for its national collegiate championship football and wrestling teams. Mr. Keith is married and has a son and daughter. He was awarded the Newberry Medal for 1957 for Rifles for Watie."

"The boy felt happy and excited. He liked the sweet air and the delightful chill of it at night no matter what the daytime heat had been. He would never forget his feeling of enchantment the previous afternoon when, seated on the prairie with a plate of food, he kept seeing the sky in all directions beneath his horse's belly no matter where the animal grazed around him. He was exhilarated by the lonely magnificence of the country, and the sense of freedom it inspired. It was like being in a boat on the ocean with no land in sight."

"Fritz Romberg relaxed his grip on the bridle reins and squinted into the sun. Beneath his blond hair that spiraled in tiny curls and ringlets, beads of sweat ran off his tan face and down inside his cotton shirt that smelled old and stale. A gentle, docile boy, he was small for his thirteen years, but strong, wiry, and not afraid of anyone."

"Bud Wilkinson was a big, blond, articulate man with a soft, modulated voice and a smile that would charm the birds out of the trees. When he was standing talking with somebody, he would sometimes shuffle his feet, bob his head, and, clasping his hands in front of him, rub them softly together. You felt comfortable in his presence and drawn to him even before you were introduced."

"Harold Keith grew up in rural Oklahoma, and writes with sympathy and understanding about this part of the country. He has always been keenly interested in nature study, and spent much of his time as a youngster pursuing this hobby. Mr. Keith's first story was published when he was fourteen years old, in a magazine called Lone Scout. He was graduated from the University of Oklahoma at Norman, where he also earned a master's degree in history. For many years he was Director of Sports Information at the University of Oklahoma, but now he devotes his full time to writing. He has published a number of books, among them Rifles for Watie, winner of the 1958 Newbery Medal; Komantcia, Sports and Games; and Brief Garland."

"I admired Red's honesty. He was human. He was thinking about getting to dribble out into the spotlight with the other four starters in the introduction ceremony. And he was thinking about playing the full twenty-four minutes with his team instead of only the last five. Pop nodded and his blue eyes gleamed queerly. "I thought you'd feel that way," he said. "Know what? I'm going to start you against Bancroft Friday. You've earned it.""

"The starting players are the ones the fans and sportswriters talk about. Nobody pays any attention to a sub."

"An athlete is the shiniest target of all."

"Later, while I was picking up wet towels, Red Rafferty came busting out of the shower, naked as a jaybird and wet as a hell-diver. His freckles glistened in the eerie glow of the gymnasium lights. The first thing he did, even before he toweled himself, was reach inside his locker for that big hat and jam it on his head."

"But Pop just shook his head in his kindly way. "Today, he played only offense," he said. "You've never seen him on defense. No little guy can guard a big kid, or take a rebound away from him. We'll work with him; let's see how he comes along. But right now it would be suicide to throw him in there against a good team- like Bancroft." Bancroft! Slim winced. He always winces when somebody mentions Bancroft. We've never beaten them. Bancroft is the biggest junior high school in the state. It sprawls all over one side of a hill in Sun City, where the state university is located."

"It's hard to change a coach's mind once he makes it up a certain way."

"Reddy, crouching in the corn, was saddened by the loss of his friend. He dropped his head between his front paws, his green eyes darting vigilantly at all his enemies- dogs and men- standing triumphantly around the pickups. They wouldn't catch him. Nothing on four feet could catch him."