Top 100 Quotes About American Literature
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.
Diane Wakoski
#4. 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
#5. 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
#7. I have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.
David Eddings
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Roy: The immutable heart of what we are that bleeds through whatever we might become. All else is vanity.
Tony Kushner
#11. 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
#12. 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
#14. I have never had the lust to meet famous authors; the best of them is in their books.
Michael Gold
#15. The American girl isn't ANY girl; she's a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species.
Henry James
#17. 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
#18. I think if German literature could survive the '40s and Russian literature could survive Sovietism, American literature can survive Google.
Joshua Cohen
#19. Axel smiled. "They say that good judgment comes from experience. And experience come from bad judgment." Alec laughed...
Ward Just
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.
Kate Atkinson
#26. Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream.
Jean Toomer
#27. Serving time doesn't make you fit to do anything but serve more time.
Donald Hays
#28. 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
#29. Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
Toni Morrison
#30. 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
#31. If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.
Sven Birkerts
#32. 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
#33. If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.
Richard Dawkins
#34. 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
#35. I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.
Ralph Ellison
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Big Ma didn't need to say any more and she didn't. T.J. was far from her favorite person and it was quite obvious that Stacey and I owed our good fortune entirely to T.J.'s obnoxious personality.
Mildred D. Taylor
#39. As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.
David Eagleman
#40. At times, the reader of World War II literature must think every American, from general to G.I., kept a war diary, later mined for memoirs of the conflict. Few diaries, however, were published in their own right.
Nigel Hamilton
#41. 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.
Kiese Laymon
#42. Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.
Helen Vendler
#44. There is something very romantic about the orphan figure in American literature.
Christopher Bollen
#45. I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet.
Eileen Myles
#46. I hope someday to see California literature become a part of mainstream American literature, and I hope to be part of that process.
Carolyn See
#47. Christians are the salt of the earth ... Nothing grows where they've been.
Donald Hays
#48. To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.
Sinclair Lewis
#49. If you want to communicate with the American public, the literature tells you you've got to be talking at about a sixth-grade, seventh-grade level.
Richard Carmona
#50. I think that Oprah's on a mission to improve the lives of the average American in various ways. And one of them is to bring literature to people who would normally not be quite as demanding in their reading tastes, to show them writing that can be more than just entertainment.
Janet Fitch
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.
Dashiell Hammett
#54. The Bohemian who tires of life, who gives up by retirement into insamity or suicide, is not necessarily one who had failed in what he wants to express.
Emily Hahn
#55. Some people might be surprised that 'Rambo's creator has a doctorate in American literature. One of my influences is Henry James, whose major theme is awareness. Whether I'm writing about military personnel, law enforcement, or De Quincey, the persistent theme is paying attention in a hostile world.
David Morrell
#56. This book is dedicated to every woman who has ever felt self-conscious about her size. Outer beauty comes in all sizes, shapes, heights, ages, and colors. And inner beauty will always shine through, no matter what the packaging.
Raynetta Manees
#57. I read every one of the books on the shelf marked American Negro Literature. I became a nationalist, a colour nationalist, through the writings of men and women who lived a world away from me.
Peter Abrahams
#58. By the mid 1920s the typical American town was in full sexual bloom. The change came with erotic fashions, literature and movies, and an unsuspected sexual aid, the automobile.
John Leo
#59. [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.
Hal Holbrook
#60. 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
#61. Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out ...
Ben Marcus
#62. She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.
Marcel Proust
#63. Magic Realism is not new. The label's new, the specific Latin American form of it is new, its modern popularity is new, but it's been around as long as literature has been around.
Terri Windling
#64. Since 'Huckleberry Finn,' or thereabouts, it seemed that all American literature was about the alienated hero.
Bobbie Ann Mason
#65. The great writers, Conrad, Maugham and Melville, spent only a few years in the South Seas, but their memory of those waters was indestructible; for the nature of life in the islands commands attention to the vivid world and its even more vivid inhabitants.
James A. Michener
#66. Nat played away and never minded anyone, while his eyes shone, his cheeks reddened, and his thin fingers flew, as he hugged the old fiddle and made it speak to all their hearts the language that he loved.
Louisa May Alcott
#67. All good American literature is always interested in people who are ambiguously heroic, like Gatsby.
John Green
#68. 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
#69. When I came to America, I was already a writer, already published in Bosnia. I was planning to go back, but I had no choice but to stay here after the civil war, so I enrolled at Northwestern in a master's program and studied American literature.
Aleksandar Hemon
#70. She believed being so free with her sexuality was empowering, but I wouldn't say taking home a douchebag who would laugh about the encounter with his friend later is a step forward in the feminist movement.-Lily
Teresa Lo
#71. You might like that one. But I'll tell you the same thing I tell my students when they complain about the depressing nature of American literature: life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly ( ... )
Matthew Quick
#72. Esther loses her virginity, hemorrhages during the process, and almost bleeds to death - like Catherine in A Farewell to Arms - and I do wonder why women are always hemorrhaging in American literature.
Matthew Quick
#73. Writing. Not writing. Twin Terrors. Putting one's mother into words ... It may have been easier to put her in her grave.
William H Gass
#74. They speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement ...
Isabel Wilkerson
#75. The adolescent protagonist is one of the hallmarks of American literature.
Tayari Jones
#76. Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Wallace Stevens
#78. 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,
#79. He Said...
Your garden at dusk
Is the soul of love
Blurred in its beauty
And softly caressing;
I, gently daring
This sweetest confessing,
Say your garden at dusk
Is your soul, My Love.
Anne Spencer
#80. Only on a few occasions had I ever been comfortable showing my body off, and now here I was, taking a job where Asian boobs and ass ran free.
Teresa Lo
#81. I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.
Jonathan Frakes
#82. So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day.
Zora Neale Hurston
#83. I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.
Leslie Fiedler
#84. I was always drawn to teachers who made class interesting. In high school, I enjoyed my American and English literature classes because my teachers, Jeanne Dorsey and Dani Barton, created an environment where interaction was important.
Ellen Ochoa
#85. I have an English literature degree. I wanted to be the next great American novelist from a very early age, but I put it aside for a while, because I got very realistic at one point.
Daniel Suarez
#86. There is nothing political about American literature.
Laura Bush
#87. Powell belongs, in fact to the first generation of American poets who may have grown up without even a vestigial connection to the accentual-syllabic, rhyming English tradition - his inventive lines have this absence at their back.
Stephen Burt
#88. Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
Sinclair Lewis
#89. You can handcuff my wrists, and Shackle my feet. You can bind me in chains, throw me in your deepest darkest dungeon...but you can't enslave my thinking...for it is free like the wind.
Jaye Swift
#90. Harper: You, the one part of
the real world I wasn't allergic to.
Tony Kushner
#91. Samuel Marshak was one of the founders of modern Russian children's literature. Soviet children used to know his poems by heart, but only since glasnost have American editors shown any interest in issuing his poems here.
Michael Patrick Hearn
#92. I've translated a lot of American literature into Japanese, and I think that what makes a good translator is, above all, a feel for language and also a great affection for the work you're translating. If one of those elements is missing the translation won't be worth much.
Haruki Murakami
#93. The American's literature is all about being hot and sexy, inspiring a girl and going to bed with her. It focuses on being a hero, saving lives and surviving last, but it has nothing to do with dignity, serenity.
M.F. Moonzajer
#94. What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of 'The Naked and the Dead' and American literature's leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of 'The Village Voice.'
James Wolcott
#95. Not only are most of our citizens fathomlessly ignorant of the glories of American literature, a fast-growing percentage of our students are no longer taught much about any works of American art, be they novels, paintings, symphonies or ballets.
Terry Teachout
#96. We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul labouring in isolation. We must strike it down because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature.
John Green
#97. Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it's some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don't know nothin' but what we see.
Zora Neale Hurston
#98. The Astonishment Tapes will now take its place within the growing field of international research about postwar American poetry's important contribution to world literature. Miriam Nichols has once again done exceptional scholarship.
Peter Gizzi
#99. The thing American people fear about corporations is that they might achieve too much power. We have an antipathy to power even as we admire it.
Annie Proulx
#100. The trick set me up. It's that simple.
Shadez
