Best American Literature Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 2

“We dare not be original; our American Pine must be cut to the trim pattern of the English Yew, though the Pine bleed at every clip. This poet tunes his lyre at the harp of Goethe, Milton, Pope, or Tennyson. His songs might better be sung on the Rhine than the Kennebec. They are not American in form or feeling; they have not the breath of our air; the smell of our ground is not in them. Hence our poet seems cold and poor. He loves the old mythology; talks about Pluto—the Greek devil,—— the Fates and Furies—witches of old time in Greece,—-but would blush to use our mythology, or breathe the name in verse of our Devil, or our own Witches, lest he should be thought to believe what he wrote. The mother and sisters, who with many a pinch and pain sent the hopeful boyto college, must turn over the Classical Dictionary before they can ﬁnd out what the youth would be at in his rhymes. Our Poet is not deep enough to see that Aphrodite came from the ordinary waters, that Homer only hitched into rhythm and furnished the accomplishment of verse to street talk, nursery tales, and old men’s gossip, in the Ionian towns; he thinks what is common is unclean. So he sings of Corinth and Athens, which he never saw, but has not a word to say of Boston, and Fall River, and Baltimore, and New York, which are just as meet for song. He raves of Thermopylae and Marathon, with never a word for Lexington and Bunkerhill, for Cowpens, and Lundy’s Lane, and Bemis’s Heights. He loves to tell of the Ilyssus, of “ smooth sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds,” yet sings not of the Petapsco, the Susquehannah, the Aroostook, and the Willimantick. He prates of the narcissus, and the daisy, never of American dandelions andbue-eyed grass; he dwells on the lark and the nightingale, but has not a thought for the brown thrasher and the bobolink, who every morning in June rain down such showers of melody on his affected head. What a lesson Burns teaches us addressing his “rough bur thistle,” his daisy, “wee crimson tippit thing,” and ﬁnding marvellous poetry in the mouse whose nest his plough turned over! Nay, how beautifully has even our sweet Poet sung of our own Green river, our waterfowl,of the blue and fringed gentian, the glory of autumnal days.”

“اما وادی دیگری هست که همیشه می توانیم احساست صادقانه را در آن تجربه کنیم- محضر دوست. آن جا که خودپسندی های حقیرمان را دور می ریزیم و صمیمیت و تفاهم را حس می کنیم؛ همان جا که خودخواهی های حقیرغیرممکنند و شراب و کتاب و و کلام معنای دیگری به زندگی ما می دهند. به این ترتیب چیزی ساخته ایم که هیچ دروغی به آن راه ندارد. آن جا در آرامش کاملیم.”

Literature Friendship Short Story World War 2 American Literature ادبیات ادبیات آمریکا داستان کوتاه دوستی جنگ جهانی دوم

Book:Address Unknown

Source: Address Unknown

“There is something very romantic about the orphan figure in American literature.”

Literature Figures Orphan American Literature Very Romantic

Author:Christopher Bollen

“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.”

Thinking Feels Use Literature Language My Own Fiction Mines Difficulty Science Fiction Genre Exception Avoiding Unnatural American Literature

Author:Kingsley Amis

“I have for myself no conceivable complaint to make, and yet for American literature in general, and its standing in a country where industrialism and finance and science flourish and the only arts that are vital and respected are architecture and the film, I have a considerable complaint.”

Art Country Film Literature Standing Architecture Finance Complaints American Literature

Book:Why Sinclair Lewis got the Nobel prize

Source: Why Sinclair Lewis got the Nobel prize

“American literature has been, and is, singularly deficient in established critics who have anything like a rational conception of their jobs. The majority, initiate in a few of the patent rituals of Aristotle and Quintilian, don the forbidding robes of high priests to Sweetness and Light, and go about their business much as if the idea were to keep all they know to themselves.”

Ifs Knows Has Beens Ideas Light Jobs Literature Majority Critics Rational Priests Conception Ritual Sweetness Robes Patents Initiate American Literature

Author:Burton Rascoe

“American literature was enriched with Men Who Loved Allison .... Of the actual and eventual worth of this romance I cannot pretend to be an unprejudiced judge. The tale seems to me one of those many books which have profited, very dubiously indeed, by having obtained, in one way of another, the repute of being indecent.”

Men Way Book Seems Romance Literature Judging Tales One Way American Literature Allison

Book:Preface to the Past

Source: Preface to the Past

“One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set it. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.”

Fall Literature Tree Ready Drama Corruption Landscape Classic Instant Apples Eden Serpent Gleam American Literature American Landscape

Book:For Love and Money: A Writing Life

Source: For Love and Money: A Writing Life

“I think most Native American literature is unreadable by the vast majority of Native Americans. Generally speaking Indians don't read books. It's not a book culture. That's why I'm trying to make movies. Indians go to movies; Indians own video recorders.”

Thinking Trying Book Culture Literature Majority Video Native Native American American Literature Recorders

Author:Sherman Alexie

“These self-appointed deacons in the Church of Latter-Day American Literature seem to regard generosity (of words) with suspicion, texture with dislike, and any broad literary stroke with outright hate. The result is a strange and arid literary climate where a meaningless little fingernail paring like Nicholson Baker's Vox becomes an object of fascinated debate and dissection, and a truly ambitious American novel like Matthew's Heart of the Country is all but ignored.”

“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.”

Years School Literature Black White Focus Teacher Rounds Flight African American Integration Curriculum February Atlanta American Literature

Author:Natasha Trethewey

“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.”

Ifs World America Literature Grows Style Sells South British Bridges Prose Convince Tobacco Brooklyn Salesman Tomatoes American Literature Brooklyn Bridge

Book:Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

Source: Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

“Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction--perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds of contemporary fiction. It habitually exhibits, not a man of delicate organization in revolt against the inexplicable tragedy of existence, but a man of low sensibilities and elemental desires yielding himself gladly to his environment, and so achieving what, under a third-rate civilization, passes for success. To get on: this is the aim. To weigh and reflect, to doubt and rebel: this is the thing to be avoided.”

Source: H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series

“The aim of poetry, it appears, is to fill the mind with lofty thoughts--not to give it joy, but to give it a grand and somewhat gaudy sense of virtue. The essay is a weapon against the degenerate tendencies of the age. The novel, properly conceived, is a means of uplifting the spirit; its aim is to inspire, not merely to satisfy the low curiosity of man in man.”

Source: H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series

“The Puritan, of course, is not entirely devoid of aesthetic feeling. He has a taste for good form; he responds to style; he is even capable of something approaching a purely aesthetic emotion. But he fears this aesthetic emotion as an insinuating distraction from his chief business in life: the sober consideration of the all-important problem of conduct. Art is a temptation, a seduction, a Lorelei, and the Good Man may safely have traffic with it when it is broken to moral uses--in other words, when its innocence is pumped out of it, and it is purged of gusto.”

Source: Prejudices Second Series

“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.”

Ifs Ideas Literature Honest Materials Healthy Democratic Strikes Distrust Prevailing Paralyzed Resolute American Literature Platitudes

Book:H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series

Source: H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series

“If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.”

Ifs Literature Critics Orderly American Literature Allan Poe

Author:H. L. Mencken

“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.”

Source: H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series

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

Literature Despite Remarkable Mediocrity Respectable American Literature

Book:H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series

Source: H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series

“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.”

Writing Whole Literature Novel Reader Scene Phrases Cherish Awkward Spoiled Lumps American Literature Bad Writing Sodium

Book:A book of prefaces

Source: A book of prefaces

“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.”

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

Doe Book Literature Satisfaction Arise Touched Carrie Sister American Literature Smirk

Book:A book of prefaces

Source: A book of prefaces

“All good American literature is always interested in people who are ambiguously heroic, like Gatsby.”

People Literature Heroic American Literature

Author:John Green

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”

Book Literature Modern Mark Usa American Literature Modern War Huckleberry Modern Literature

Author:Ernest Hemingway

“I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.”

Years I Can Literature Four Four Years American Literature Postmodern Doctorates

Author:Kate Atkinson

“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.”

“The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass”

Want Different Real Reason Whole Home Literature Figures All Things Admire Grass Tourists Walt Leaves Of Grass American Literature English Literature American Writer

Book:Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)

Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)

“[Mark] Twain is pointing at you. You, the reader of the book one hundred and thirty years ago and today. That is what has made it a great American novel and the most widely read book in American Literature around the world today.”

World Years Made Book Today Literature Novel Reader Hundred Years Ago Mark Made It Around The World Thirty Pointing World Today Thirty Years Great American American Literature

Author:Hal Holbrook

“I always thought books were just the canon, things I couldn't identify with. And then I was introduced to really amazing multicultural literature - it was all things I was trying to do unsuccessfully in my poetry. It really just changed everything. I was introduced to authors like Sandra Cisneros, Gabriel García Márquez, Junot Díaz, and a lot of African American literature, as well.”

Trying Wells Book Literature Changed All Things African American Multicultural Gabriel American Literature Canon Really Amazing

Author:Matt de la Pena

“First of all, the novel should be a critique of the novels that have come before it in a language that broadens the audience of American literature. Second, it's really got to be invested in a number of what-if questions.”

Ifs Should Firsts Literature Language Numbers Novel Audience What If Critique American Literature

Author:Kiese Laymon

“I think American literature is in a tedious place, horrible place. I can't even engage with it.”

Thinking I Can Literature Horrible Tedious American Literature

Author:Jessa Crispin

“I like European and South American literature, but mostly I read nonfiction.”

Literature South Nonfiction American Literature

Author:Jessa Crispin

“I didn't ever consider poetry the province exclusively of English and American literature and I discovered a great amount in reading Polish poetry and other Eastern European poetry and reading Russian poetry and reading Latin American and Spanish poetry and I've always found models in those other poetries of poets who could help me on my path.”

Helping Reading Found Literature Path Poet Amount Models Help Me Latin Eastern Polish Latin America Provinces American Literature Latin American

Author:Edward Hirsch

“Magic realism - somebody used that phrase the other day that is familiar with South American literature. That rang a bell. It resonates with me.”

Used Literature Magic South Familiar Phrases Bells Realism American Literature Magic Realism

Author:Sam Neill

“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.”

Thinking World Firsts Done Literature Talking Class Mouths University Sentences Theme Professors New World Notebook Reconcile First Class Kentucky American Literature

Author:Sam Abell

“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.”

People Thinking Sometimes Literature Imagination Example African American Relate American Literature Designation

Author:Roxane Gay

“I am fine with my books being categorized as African-American literature but I hope they are also considered Haitian-American literature and American literature. All of these things are part of who I am and what I write.”

Writing Book Literature Fine Who I Am African American American Literature Haitian

Author:Roxane Gay

“I think the "crime novel" has replaced the sociological novel of the 1930s. I think the progenitor of that tradition is James M. Cain, who in my view is the most neglected writer in American literature.”

Thinking Literature Views Novel Crime Tradition Replaced Neglected 1930s Cain American Literature Sociological Crime Novels

Author:James Lee Burke

“[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.”

Heart Literature Doubt Ambition Prose Insecurity Diaries Sleeves American Literature

Author:Gordon S. Wood

“The main reason I decided to study Latin American literature was because I'd gotten somewhat bored by the American fiction I was reading. I am not drawn to a specific style or aesthetic. When I think about literature, I think about it in the three languages I read easily - English, Spanish, and Portuguese. The authors I prefer are all very different and are not limited to certain genres or even certain time periods. Reading across three languages is a way for me to diversify my intake as a reader, not to tunnel into certain categories or demographics.”

Thinking Different Reason Reading Literature Language Study Style Bored Latin Aesthetic Latin America American Literature Portuguese

Author:Adam Morris

“One that actually relates to all Latin American literature: that is, not every author is interested in being a representative of his or her national culture on the global stage.”

Culture Literature Latin Latin America American Literature

Author:Adam Morris

“The writers who have been serious about recreating American literature have always been far and few between. What we do have at the end of the 20th century that we didn't have at the beginning, at that time of the Lost Generation of rich white boys, is a mixture. We're now getting gay writers of color, let's say, and women of color being published. This is unprecedented.”

Literature Boys Rich Serious Gay 20th Century American Literature

Author:Ana Castillo

“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.”

World Literature Violence Relation Acknowledge Native Sunlight Native American American Literature

Author:Robert Bringhurst

“Freud did some serious damage to American literature - a lot of writers began therapy in the 1940s, after which they all became terribly egocentric.”

Literature Serious Therapy American Literature Egocentric

Author:Gore Vidal

“I think New York is working its way into my poems. It takes a while for a place to filter its way onto the page, but I've been reading more and more American poetry and I certainly feel it as quite a freeing force. Coming from the formally ordered tradition of poetry in Ireland, I find the expansiveness of American literature freeing in some sense.”

Thinking Reading Literature Tradition Ireland American Literature

Author:Nick Laird

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

Literature Education Clear Cold Pure Professors American Literature

Author:Sinclair Lewis

“American literature has always been immigrant.”

Literature Immigrants American Literature

Author:Salman Rushdie

“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.”

Littles Age School Mother Literature Modern Collections Prize Copies This Day Ashes Shelves Essays Introduction American Literature Modern English

Author:Wilbur Smith

“Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.”

Literature Source British Sensibility Inappropriate American Literature

Book:Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

Source: Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

American Literature Quotes

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American Literature Quotes