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American Literature Quotes

American Literature quote from classy quote

Twas noontide of summer,And mid-time of night;And stars, in their orbits,Shone pale, thro' the lightOf the brighter, cold moon,'Mid planets her slaves,Herself in the Heavens,Her beam on the waves.I gazed awhileOn her cold smile;Too cold–too cold for me-There pass'd, as a shroud,A fleecy cloud,And I turned away to thee,Proud Evening Star,In thy glory afar,And dearer thy beam shall be;For joy to my heartIs the proud partThou bearest in Heaven at night,And more I admireThy distant fire,Than that colder, lowly light.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe American Literature Edgar Allan Poe Poems Poetry Stars

There is nothing political about American literature.

~ Laura Bush

Laura Bush American Literature Dumb Literature Politics Reading

The child came to a stop beside her mother and stared up at her face as if she had never seen it before. It was the face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to Powell himself. The child turned her head quickly, and past the Negroe's ambling figures she could see the column of smoke rising and widening unchecked inside the granite line of trees. She stood taut, listening, and could just catch in the distance a few wild high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them.

~ Flannery O'connor

Flannery O'connor American Literature Fiction Short Stories Southern

The greatest Americans have not been born yet they are waiting patiently for the past to die.

~ Saul Williams

Saul Williams American Literature Future History Poetry

Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out …

~ Ben Marcus

Ben Marcus American Literature Literature

Here the earth, as if to prove its immensity, empties itself. Gertrude Stein said: 'In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.' The uncluttered stretches of the American West and the deserted miles of roads force a lone traveler to pay attention to them by leaving him isolated in them. This squander of land substitutes a sense of self with a sense of place by giving him days of himself until, tiring of his own small compass, he looks for relief to the bigness outside -- a grandness that demands attention not just for its scope, but for its age, its diversity, its continual change. The isolating immensity reveals what lies covered in places noisier, busier, more filled up. For me, what I saw revealed was this (only this): a man nearly desperate because his significance had come to lie within his own narrow ambit.

~ William Least Heat-Moon

William Least Heat-Moon America American Literature Memoir Road Trips Travel Travel Writing

...that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.

~ Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac Adventure American Culture American Literature Growing Up Haunted Homesick Life Experience Lost Soul Quest For Meaning Road Trip Self Discovery Shadow Self Strange Moment Traveling Turning Points Who Am I

Our fiction is not merely in flight from the physical data of the actual world…it is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic – a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation…our classic [American] literature is a literature of horror for boys

~ Leslie Fielder

Leslie Fielder American Literature Gothic Grotesque Horror

I have seen them stagger out of their movie palaces and blink their empty eyes in the face of reality once more, and stagger home, to read the Times, to find out what's going on in the world. I have vomited at their newspapers, read their literature, observed their customs, eaten their food, desired their women, gaped at their art. But I am poor, and my name ends with a soft vowel, and they hate me and my father, and my father's father, and they would have my blood and put me down, but they are old now, dying in the sun and in the hot dust of the road, and I am young and full of hope and love for my country and my times, and when I say Greaser to you it is not my heart that speaks, but the quivering of an old wound, and I am ashamed of the terrible thing I have done.

~ John Fante

John Fante America American Literature Immigrant Experience Immigrants

Harper: You, the one part ofthe real world I wasn't allergic to.

~ Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner American Literature Angels In America Drama Kushner Love Queer

Roy: The immutable heart of what we are that bleeds through whatever we might become. All else is vanity.

~ Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner American Literature Angels In America Drama Kushner Queer

Out of the magazines I read came a passionate call for the experiences of the disinherited, and there were none of the lame lispings of the missionary in it. It did not say: Be like us and we will like you, maybe. It said: If you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find that you are not alone.

~ Richard Wright

Richard Wright American Literature Communism

I have never had the lust to meet famous authors, the best of them is in their books.

~ Michael Gold

Michael Gold American Literature Communism Jewish Literature Leftism New York Social Realism

Young poets are too apt to consider themselves “children of the mist” – they must dwell apart from men and contemn their kind, or they fear they shall be only taken for common-place characters. They forget that poetry is the language which speaks to all hearts—and that instead of cherishing the sacred fire as a lonely light, as one that burns in a charnel house, they should bring it forth in its beauty and brightness as a guide to the pleasant places and sparkling waters of earth’s happiness and the radiant messenger of heaven’s exalted hopes. And they should rejoice and be glad that to them the kindling of such high imagination is given. ~ Sarah Josepha Hale Ladies Magazine, November 1830From the Introduction to Cherishing the Sacred Fire

~ Deborah L. Halliday

Deborah L. Halliday American Literature Nineteenth Century Poetry Poetry Poets Sarah Josepha Hale

Social class. Class remains our national awkward topic, usually mumbled over in academic diversity workshops; indeed, most people don't know how to talk about class without automatically coupling it with race. That's because we Americans are loath to recognize that the sky's-the-limit potential we take as our birthright comes at a price far beyond what many Americans--of any race--can afford to pay.

~ Maureen Corrigan

Maureen Corrigan American Literature Biography Great American Novel Literary Criticism
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