American Literature Quotes - Page 3

• I am interested in Scripture and theology. This is an interest that I can assume I would share with a pastor, so that makes me a little bit prone to use that kind of character, perhaps, just at the moment. Then there is also the fact that, having been a church member for many years, I am very aware of how much pastors enrich people's experience, people for whom they are significant. I know that it's a kind of custom of American literature and culture to slang them. I don't think there is any reason why that needs to be persisted in.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Character, Thinking, Years

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• [John Adams's] vividly descriptive prose is supremely quotable. Adams wears his heart on his sleeve and reveals all of his ambitions, doubts, and insecurities, especially in his diary, which is one of the greatest and most readable in all of American literature.

  Gordon S. Wood

  Heart, Ambition, Insecurity

  Source: www.theimaginativeconservative.org

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• We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul labouring in isolation. We must strike it down because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature.

  John Green

  Lying, Book, Soul

  "John Green: why I'll never self-publish" by Alison Flood, www.theguardian.com. June 6, 2013.

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• Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes me truly happy to be a reader.

  Michael Chabon

  Writing, Important, Three

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• Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

  Sinclair Lewis

  Education, Literature, Cold

  Nobel Prize address, Stockholm, 12 Dec. 1930

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• I know why the caged bird sings.

  Maya Angelou

  Inspirational, Children, Book

  Title of book (1969), taken from the last line of "Sympathy" by Paul Laurence Dunbar in Lyrics of Hearthside (1899). Cf. Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1979) 567:10

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• The designation is useful and necessary and sometimes limiting but it is only limiting to people who think, for example, that African-American literature couldn't possibly be something they could be interested in or relate to. They have limited imaginations, which is sad.

  Roxane Gay

  Thinking, People, Imagination

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I like the hip writers: Fitzgerald, the guy who committed suicide, Hemingway, all those guys. Some of them were alcoholics and drug addicts but they had fun. They were real people. They formed the culture of American literature. Hemingway admired Tolstoy, Tolstoy admired Pushkin, and Mailer admired Hemingway. It all flows down. The greats are all connected. One day I'm gonna write a book myself. The first chapter will be about what a rough deal my momma got. She believed in you guys and your society.

  Mike Tyson

  Suicide, Fun, Real

  "Boxing: Tyson's complicated world". Interview with Paul Hayward, www.telegraph.co.uk. May 1, 2002.

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• One is conscious of no brave and noble earnestness in it, of no generalized passion for intellectual and spiritual adventure, of no organized determination to think things out. What is there is a highly self-conscious and insipid correctness, a bloodless respectability submergence of matter in manner--in brief, what is there is the feeble, uninspiring quality of German painting and English music.

  H. L. Mencken

  Spiritual, Determination, Adventure

  H. L. Mencken, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (2010). “H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series”, Hubsta Ltd

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• I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years in the Islamic republic.

  Azar Nafisi

  Islamic, Iran, Years

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• Every reader of the Dreiser novels must cherish astounding specimens--of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so many lumps of sodium hyposulphite.

  H. L. Mencken

  Writing, Awkward, Sodium

  H.L. Mencken (1917). “A book of prefaces”, p.86, Рипол Классик

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• Héctor Tobar's accomplished first novel affords a perspective that is overdue and urgently needed in North American literature- -an insider's vision of L.A. as a Third World city. The Tattooed Soldier is a riveting book that manages to be at once politically informed and at the same time a psychologically astute study of that most elemental of stories: revenge.

  Stuart Dybek

  Revenge, Book, Cities

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• Dagwood Bumstead was a great unrecognized hero of American literature. He showed up every day, he got knocked down every day, he never got to eat his sandwich every day, the dog jumped on him every day, his wife was giving him a hard time and he showed up every day.

  James L. Brooks

  Dog, Hero, Hard Times

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• The first function of violence in Native American literatures is simply to acknowledge that violence is implicit, like gravity and sunlight, in the world and our relations with the world.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Native American, Violence, Literature

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• In my first class at the University of Kentucky, my American Literature professor came in, and the first sentence out of his mouth was "The central theme of American Literature is an attempt to reconcile what we've done to the New World." wrote that down in my notebook, and thought, "What is he talking about?" But that's what I think about now. The New World and what we've done to it.

  Sam Abell

  Notebook, Thinking, Kentucky

  Source: aphotoeditor.com

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• Janet Mock's honest and sometimes searing journey is a rare and important look into la vida liminal, one that she manages to negotiate remarkably well, with grace, humor, and fierce grit. Mock doesn't only redefine what realness means to her, but challenges us to rethink our own perceptions of gender and sexuality, feminism and sisterhood, making this book a transcendent piece of American literature.

  Raquel Cepeda

  Book, Mean, Journey

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• With some exceptions in science fiction and other genres I have small difficulty in avoiding anything that could be called American literature. I feel it is unnatural, not I think entirely because it uses a language that is not mine, however closely akin to my own.

  Kingsley Amis

  Thinking, Fiction, Use

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• Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.

  H. L. Mencken

  Art, Determination, Writing

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• One does not arise from such a book as Sister Carrie with a smirk of satisfaction; one leaves it infinitely touched.

  H. L. Mencken

  Sister, Book, Smirk

  H.L. Mencken (1917). “A book of prefaces”, p.98, Рипол Классик

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• I've translated a lot of American literature into Japanese, and I think that what makes a good translator is, above all, a feel for language and also a great affection for the work you're translating. If one of those elements is missing the translation won't be worth much.

  Haruki Murakami

  Thinking, Missing, Elements

  Source: www.bookbrowse.com

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• In the early 1970s in Atlanta, I attended what had formerly been an all-white school but had become a black school after integration and white flight. Perhaps because of this, the teachers created a curriculum that included a focus on African American literature and history year-round, not just in February.

  Natasha Trethewey

  Teacher, School, Atlanta

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• Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.

  H. L. Mencken

  Mediocrity, Literature, Remarkable

  H. L. Mencken, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (2010). “H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series”, Hubsta Ltd

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• As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.

  H. L. Mencken

  Ideas, Healthy, Literature

  H. L. Mencken, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (2010). “H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series”, Hubsta Ltd

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• At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham's 'Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.' To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester's works and the little urn that contains my mother's ashes.

  Wilbur Smith

  Mother, School, Age

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• If the British prose style is Churchillian, America is the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can sell the world the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grow at the South Pole.

  Ishmael Reed

  Brooklyn Bridge, Bridges, America

  Ishmael Reed (2013). “Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel”, p.18, Open Road Media

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