American Writers Quotes

“When Great Trees Fall

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.”
― Maya Angelou

“I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.”
― Eudora Welty

“That’s the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public. We used to go to church to confess our worst behaviour, to be heard and forgiven, then to be redeemed and accepted back into our community
Chuck Palahniuk in interview with TMO”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“...reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers...annotations, arrows...an oudine of its design...very seriously mislead.”
― William H. Gass

“Too much shit has been written about Gypsies, mostly by American women who’ve never even talked to a Gypsy, let alone spent time in their company, but whose claim to fame is that their parents were at Woodstock.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Yes America is my homeland, for she adopted me when nobody knew I existed, but no one nation is superior to me than the rest.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Heart Force One: Need No Gun to Defend Society

“I belong to the whole world but America will always be my home country, because she adopted me and honored me as a son, when the country I was born in kicked me around like garbage.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World

“The great and present danger to American literature is the growing homogeneity of our writers, especially the younger generation. Often raised in several places in no specific cultural or religious community, educated with no deep connection to a particular region, history, or tradition, and now employed mostly in academia, the American writer is becoming as standardized as the American car—functional, streamlined, and increasingly interchangeable.”
― Dana Gioia, The Catholic Writer Today: And Other Essays

“The American writer is becoming as standardized as the American car—functional, streamlined, and increasingly interchangeable.”
― Dana Gioia, The Catholic Writer Today: And Other Essays