American Literature What Is the Greater Part of Knowledge

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Quotes tagged as "american-literature" Showing 1-30 of 81

"Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too."
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

"He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on."
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

"Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about."
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

"Twas noontide of summer,
And mid-time of night;
And stars, in their orbits,
Shone pale, thro' the light
Of the brighter, cold moon,
'Mid planets her slaves,
Herself in the Heavens,
Her beam on the waves.
I gazed awhile
On 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 heart
Is the proud part
Thou bearest in Heaven at night,
And more I admire
Thy distant fire,
Than that colder, lowly light."
― Edgar Allan Poe , The Complete Poetry

"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons  attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

"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, Ask the Dust

"There is nothing political about American literature."
― Laura Bush

"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

"I can assure you Ernest Hemingway was wrong when he said modern American literature began with Huckleberry Finn. It begins with Moby-Dick, the book that swallowed European civilization whole."
― E.L. Doctorow

"I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before."
― Mark Twain

"We are not native. We have no generations of Americans behind us. We have roots elsewhere. We are looking in from the outside. To me, that seems to be perfectly natural."
― Don DeLillo

"Nay, so great was our famine that a Salvage we slew and buried, the poorer sort took him up again and eat him; and so did divers one another, boyled and stewed with roots and herbs. And one amongst the rest did kill his wife, powdered her, and had eaten part of her, before it was knowne, for which hee was executed, as hee well deserved. Now whether shee was better roasted, boyled, or carbonado'd I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of."
― John Smith, Pocahontas: My Own Story

"Speaking was a habit she'd gotten into years ago, in the distant past, and now that she'd stopped she felt no desire to start again. It was pointless anyway - all the blah-blah-blabbing and, still, no one understood each other."
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes

"No greater humiliation, it seems to me, was meted out to any man than Montezuma; no race was ever more ruthlessly wiped out that the American Indian; no land was ever raped in a bloody and foul way than California was by the gold diggers. I blush to think of our origins—our hands are steeped in blood and crime."
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

"I am sure it is something really groundbreaking and important, Totally new and fresh. Like a story about a disillusioned white guy, wandering the world, misunderstood and coldly horny."
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

"Privately, we cannot stand our lives and dare not examine them; domestically, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country; and internationally, for millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster."
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

"The mood of Mason throughout the entire direct examination was that of a restless harrier anxious to be off at the heels of its prey— of a foxhound within the last leap of its kill. A keen and surging desire to shatter this testimony, to show it to be from start to finish the tissue of lies that in part at least it was, now animated him. And no sooner had Jephson concluded than he leaped up and confronted Clyde, who, seeing him blazing with this desire to undo him, felt as though he was about to be physically attacked.

Theodore Dreiser. An American Tragedy"
― Theodore Dreiser

"Eschew the skylark and the nightingale, birds that Audubon never found. A national literature ought to be built, as the robin builds its nest, out of the twigs and straws of one's native meadows."
― Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England

"Autonomy, newness, difference, authority, absolute power: these are the major themes and concerns of American literature, and each one is made possible, shaped, and activated by a complex awareness and use of a constituted Africanism that, deployed as rawness and savagery, provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of that quintessential American identity."
― Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

"It was a habit he developed, of incubating and maturing his thought upon a subject, and of then rushing into the type-writer with it.  That it did not see print was a matter a small moment with him.  The writing of it was the culminating act of a long mental process, the drawing together of scattered threads of thought and the final generalizing upon all the data with which his mind was burdened.  To write such an article was the conscious effort by which he freed his mind and made it ready for fresh material and problems."
― Jack London, Martin Eden

"Birden Giovanni'nin beni neden istediğini, neden bu son sığınağına getirdiğini anladım. Bu odayı yıkacak, Giovanni'ye yeni ve daha iyi bir yaşam armağan edecektim. Bu yaşam ancak benim kendi yaşamım olabilirdi ve Giovanni'nin yaşamını değiştirebilmesi için benim yaşamımın da bu odanın bir parçası olması gerekecekti."
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

"İnsanlar her şeye kötü bir sıfat yakıştırmaktan hoşlanırlar. Bu sıfatları kullanmadıkları tek zaman, kendileriyle ilgili kötü bir şey anlattıkları zamanlardır."
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

"But to bring perhaps from afar what is already founded,
To give it our own identity, average, limitless, free,
To fill the gross the torpid bulk with vital religious fire,
Not to repel or destroy so much as accept, fuse, rehabilitate,
To obey as well as command, to follow more than to lead,
These also are the lessons of our New World;
While how little the New after all, how much the Old, Old World!

- Song of the exposition"
― Walt Whitman, The Collected Poems of Walt Whitman

"Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia,
Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,
That matter of Troy and Achilles' wrath, and Aeneas', Odysseus'
wanderings,
Placard "Removed" and "To Let" on the rocks of your snowy
Parnassus,
Repeat at Jerusalem, place the notice high on Jaffa's gate and on
Mount Moriah,
The same on the walls of your German, French and Spanish
castles, and Italian collections,
For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain
awaits, demands you.

- Song of the Exposition"
― Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems

"The President is there in the White House for you, it is not you
who are here for him,
The Secretaries act in their bureaus for you, not you here for them,
The Congress convenes every Twelfth-month for you,
Laws, courts, the forming of States, the charters of cities, the
going and coming of commerce and mails, are all for you.

List close my scholars dear,
Doctrines, politics and civilization exurge from you,
Sculpture and monuments and any thing inscribed anywhere are
tallied in you,
The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records reach
is in you this hour, and myths and tales the same,
If you were not breathing and walking here, where would they
all be?
The most renown'd poems would be ashes, orations and plays
would be vacuums."
― Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems

"Established early on in life, and still is perhaps my favorite 'intuition pump' is the life of Emily Dickinson. I viewed a short biography recently where an expert, quite frankly states that she really didn't do a whole lot with her time. SHE DIDNT DO ANYTHING. She didn't even get that many poems published while she lived. I guess her parents were well off, but remember, this is the middle of the 19th century, people. So, remember, don't work too hard. and if you do, charge them a whole lotta money. Remember I have an 90 foot motor Yacht on my vision board?"
― Dmitry Dyatlov

"the absence of activity in her life is matched by the phenomenal activity of her intellect"
― Cynthia Griffin Wolff

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American Literature What Is the Greater Part of Knowledge

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/american-literature

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