12 Quotes About American Literature

Twas noontide of summer, And mid-time of night; And stars, in their orbits, Shone pale, thro' the light Of the brighter, cold moon, ' Mid planets her slaves, Herself in the Heavens, Her beam on the waves. I gazed awhile On her cold smile; Too cold—too cold for me- There pass'd, as a shroud, A fleecy cloud, And I turned away to thee, Proud Evening Star, In thy glory afar, And dearer thy beam shall be; For joy to my heart Is the proud part Thou bearest in Heaven at night, And more I admire Thy distant fire, Than that colder, lowly light. Edgar Allan Poe

The child came to a stop beside her mother and stared up at her face as if she had never seen it before. It was the face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to Powell himself. The child turned her head quickly, and past the Negroe's ambling figures she could see the column of smoke rising and widening unchecked inside the granite line of trees. She stood taut, listening, and could just catch in the distance a few wild high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them. . Flannery OConnor

The greatest Americans have not been born yet they are waiting patiently for the past to die. Saul Williams

Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out … Ben Marcus

Our fiction is not merely in flight from the physical data of the actual world…it is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic — a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation…our classic [American] literature is a literature of horror for boys Leslie Fielder

Harper: You, the one part ofthe real world I wasn't allergic to. Tony Kushner

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

Out of the magazines I read came a passionate call for the experiences of the disinherited, and there were none of the lame lispings of the missionary in it. It did not say: "Be like us and we will like you, maybe." It said: "If you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find that you are not alone. Richard Wright

Young poets are too apt to consider themselves “children of the mist” — they must dwell apart from men and contemn their kind, or they fear they shall be only taken for common-place characters. They forget that poetry is the language which speaks to all hearts–and that instead of cherishing the sacred fire as a lonely light, as one that burns in a charnel house, they should bring it forth in its beauty and brightness as a guide to the pleasant places and sparkling waters of earth’s happiness and the radiant messenger of heaven’s exalted hopes. And they should rejoice and be glad that to them the kindling of such high imagination is given. ~ Sarah Josepha Hale Ladies Magazine, November 1830From the Introduction to Cherishing the Sacred Fire. Deborah L. Halliday

Social class. Class remains our national awkward topic, usually mumbled over in academic diversity workshops; indeed, most people don't know how to talk about class without automatically coupling it with race. That's because we Americans are loath to recognize that the sky's-the-limit potential we take as our birthright comes at a price far beyond what many Americans--of any race--can afford to pay. Maureen Corrigan