Best American Literature Quotes

#1. If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.

Richard Dawkins

#2. She's the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She's the self-made girl!
( ... )
Well, to begin with, the self-made girl's a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn't self-made at all. We all help to make her, we take such an interest in her.

Henry James

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

Kate Atkinson

#4. It was a good day to die, but nobody did.

Stephen Graham Jones

#5. Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream.

Jean Toomer

#6. Serving time doesn't make you fit to do anything but serve more time.

Donald Hays

#7. 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.

Sherman Alexie

#8. Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

Toni Morrison

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

Sam Neill

#10. If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.

Sven Birkerts

#11. like many families, everyone wandered around like children in a funhouse - they could hardly see one another around the corners, and what they could see was completely distorted.

James Hannaham

#12. Black children need to see their lives reflected in the books they read. If they don't, they won't feel welcome in the world of literature. The lives of African-Americans are rich and diverse, and the books our children read should reflect that.

Valerie Wilson Wesley

#13. Life on
Life on the reservation
Life on the reservation is dirty
Life on the reservation is dirty, filthy
Life on the reservation is dirty, filthy dogs.

(Dena Colhoff, student)

Timothy P. McLaughlin

#14. I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.

Ralph Ellison

#15. The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines.

Michael Eric Dyson

#16. At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can't fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I'm reading, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I think I'm in literature,' but my life was never like that.

Soledad O'Brien

#17. Theatre for a New Audience is one of America's most admirable and exciting theatre companites ... some of the best acted and directed work to be found on American stages, engaging with the canon of world dramatic literature in a vigorous way.

Tony Kushner

#18. 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

#19. I want to kill every best-seller list and encourage Americans to discover for themselves inspired new literature that will endure in perpetuity. Let's pluck from squalid obscurity underground, and publish, the next Hemingways, Fitzgeralds, Morrisons, Bellows, Barths, Vonneguts and Faulkners.

David B. Lentz

#20. The best work of literature to represent the American Dream is 'The Great Gatsby' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It shows us how dreaming can be tainted by reality, and that if you don't compromise, you may suffer.

Azar Nafisi

#21. I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.

Per Petterson

#22. 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

#23. For someone who made such an enormous contribution to American literature, Mark Twain has been the subject of many books but few major biographies.

Michael Patrick Hearn

#24. American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.

Diane Wakoski

#25. 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

#26. And that's the beginning of the primary conversation in African American literature, right there: the African descendant explaining to the European descendant about how white people's actions are affecting the lives of black people.* In

Mat Johnson

#27. He was a glance from God.

Zora Neale Hurston

#28. I have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

David Eddings

#29. It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.

Anatole Broyard

#30. American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.

Christopher Dawson

#31. Roy: The immutable heart of what we are that bleeds through whatever we might become. All else is vanity.

Tony Kushner

#32. 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

#33. Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.

Michael N. Castle

#34. It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful.

Zora Neale Hurston

#35. I have never had the lust to meet famous authors; the best of them is in their books.

Michael Gold

#36. The American girl isn't ANY girl; she's a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species.

Henry James

#37. O my poor words, bear with me.

Theodore Roethke

#38. Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.

Nathaniel Philbrick

#39. I think if German literature could survive the '40s and Russian literature could survive Sovietism, American literature can survive Google.

Joshua Cohen

#40. Axel smiled. "They say that good judgment comes from experience. And experience come from bad judgment." Alec laughed...

Ward Just

#41. It would be hard to exaggerate Ernest Hemingway's influence over American literature, but his influence on our lives is probably larger still.

Arthur Phillips

#42. Modern American literature was born in protest, born in rebellion, born out of the sense of loss and indirection which was imposed upon the new generations out of the realization that the old formal culture-the "New England idea"-could no longer serve.

Alfred Kazin