American Author Quotes

Oh! sing it in the light of freedom's morn,
Tho' tyrant wars have made the earth a grave;
The good, the great, and true, are, if so born,
And so with slaves, chains do not make the slave!

For the past thirty years or so, much American poetry has been marked by an earnestness that rejects the comic. This has nothing to do with seriousness. The comic can be very serious. The trouble with the earnest is that it seeks to be commended. It seeks to be praised for its intention more than for what it is saying.

It's responsible for the sloppiness and imprecision of the War on Terror, for example. It's responsible for taking people's tax dollars and spending the country into debt on useless wars and pointless pork projects to buy votes. It's responsible for bailing out the banks instead of standing up for the people the banks cheated. It's responsible for plenty,

The big picture is that there is no big picture.
That's why we keep painting it.

Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially.

Amos Bronson Alcott
Amos Bronson Alcott
Still, not much of a reason to live, is it? The fear of being punished for killing yourself.

Yet I will look upon thy face again, My own romantic Bronx, and it will be A face more pleasant than the face of men. Thy waves are old companions, I shall see A well remembered form in each old tree And hear a voice long loved in thy wild minstrelsy.

Joseph Rodman Drake
Joseph Rodman Drake
The religions of the world are luminous in their individuality, and they have valuable social and soulmaking functions. Surely someday we will quit killing each other over their different strategies.

The pursuit of exotic beauty in such a life would have been like having a ball of tinfoil in your stomach, all that airy metal filling you up with hunger.

Laura Kasischke
Laura Kasischke
Poetry is road maintenance for a fragmented world which seeks to be kept together. It's been an integral activity for a long time.

You'd scarce expect one of my age
To speak in public on the stage;
And if I chance to fall below
Demosthenes or Cicero,
Don't view me with a critic's eye,
But pass my imperfections by.
Large streams from little fountains flow,
Tall oaks from little acorns grow.

I am going to devour you, Magdelegna, he promised her, the darkness of his cravings coming to bear on her fully at last. You wanted to know my passions? Allow me to introduce them to you.

We can only do what is possible for us to do. But still it is good to know what the impossible is.

María Irene Fornés
María Irene Fornés
A poem is not an expression, nor is it an object. Yet it somewhat partakes of both. What a poem is is never to be known, for which I have learned to be grateful.

Much contemporary verse reads like failed short-short stories rather than failed poetry.

There are bullfighters who do it just for the money-they are worthless [said Hemingway]. The only one who matters is the bullfighter who feels it, so that if he did it for nothing, he would do it just as well. Same holds true for damn near everyone.

How strange it was that a dream, once realized, could quickly turn mundane.

I think it must be lonely to be God.
Nobody loves a master. No.

Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.

You know the sultans used to light their garden parties with turtles? They'd put candles on their backs and let them wander around. Hundreds of them.

He wanted to think of words that would make some difference but there were none in any language he knew that were sufficient to the moment or that would change a single thing.

You think you got something big to say? Something momentous? Or is it what you had to memorize in order to escape the men with lightning in their eyes?

John Yau
John Yau
Only Death could teach us love
By Death we shall grow wise.

To say in print what she thinks is the last thing the woman novelist or journalist is so rash as to attempt…Her publishers are not women.

Elizabeth Robins
Elizabeth Robins
People often choose to misunderstand if it makes life more interesting.