American Literature Quotes

“I am always in love.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle’s heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“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, The Sun Also Rises

“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 Complete Poetry

“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“I have seen them stagger out of their movie palaces and blink their empty eyes in the face of reality once more, and stagger home, to read the Times, to find out what's going on in the world. I have vomited at their newspapers, read their literature, observed their customs, eaten their food, desired their women, gaped at their art. But I am poor, and my name ends with a soft vowel, and they hate me and my father, and my father's father, and they would have my blood and put me down, but they are old now, dying in the sun and in the hot dust of the road, and I am young and full of hope and love for my country and my times, and when I say Greaser to you it is not my heart that speaks, but the quivering of an old wound, and I am ashamed of the terrible thing I have done.”
― John Fante, Ask the Dust

“There is nothing political about American literature.”
― Laura Bush

“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, Romantic Rebels: An Informal History of Bohemianism in America

“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

“I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.”
― Mark Twain

“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

“Sociologically, politically, psychologically, spiritually, it was never enough for James Baldwin to categorize himself as one thing or the other: not just black, not just sexual, not just American, nor even just as a world-class literary artist. He embraced the whole of life the way the sun’s gravitational passion embraces everything from the smallest wandering comet to the largest looming planet.”
― Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays

“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

“I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”
― Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

“Nay, so great was our famine that a Salvage we slew and buried, the poorer sort took him up again and eat him; and so did divers one another, boyled and stewed with roots and herbs. And one amongst the rest did kill his wife, powdered her, and had eaten part of her, before it was knowne, for which hee was executed, as hee well deserved. Now whether shee was better roasted, boyled, or carbonado'd I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of.”
― John Smith, Pocahontas: My Own Story

“Our orthodox friends need not be told that all merit in this world is comparative; and once for all, we desire to say that where anything which involves qualities or character is asserted, we must be understood to mean" under the circumstances.”
― James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers

“C'è qualcos'altro che devi sempre ricordare. Ci sono persone magnifiche su questa terra, che se ne vanno in giro travestite da normali esseri umani.”
― Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“Cormac McCarthy has to be accounted as a secret master, and the rightful heir (but oh how one hates to invoke yet another Great American Writer in discussing McCarthy, who at times has seemed ot be in danger of disappearing in a heavy snowfall of comparisons to Melville, Faulkner, O'Conner, Hemingway) to the American Gothic tradition of Poe and Lovecraft, dark god of Providence, Rhode Island, where McCarthy was born.”
― Michael Chabon, The Road

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

“If you control the story, you control the culture. If you control the culture, then you control politics, and if control politics, you have control over a nation.”
― Kawika Miles, Saga of the Nine: Origins

“To die comfortably, that is the true American dream.”
― Jordan G Kobos

“Fame is a hungry monster; it is never satisfied." Bayard Taylor”
― Iota Angel, The Island Beyond the Coast - Book II: A real-life journey set in Greece during the 19th century with Bayard Taylor & Mark Twain

“The solitude revealed a drama that showed how frivolous was everything within the place from whence we had come." Hans Christian Andersen”
― Iota Angel, The Island Beyond the Coast - Book II: A real-life journey set in Greece during the 19th century with Bayard Taylor & Mark Twain

“Much that we learned, much that we saw, much that we heard, we will forget, but still a store of softly-tinted images will remain in our memories. We will remember something." Mark Twain”
― Iota Angel, The Island Beyond the Coast - Book II: A real-life journey set in Greece during the 19th century with Bayard Taylor & Mark Twain

“Boldness breeds boldness." Mark Twain”
― Iota Angel, The Island Beyond the Coast - Book II: A real-life journey set in Greece during the 19th century with Bayard Taylor & Mark Twain

“Solemn, grand, and beautiful, it will always remain in our memories." Mark Twain”
― Iota Angel, The Island Beyond the Coast - Book II: A real-life journey set in Greece during the 19th century with Bayard Taylor & Mark Twain

“One author is too favorable, another too severe, and I foresee that, inasmuch as my path lies between the two extremes, I shall be, to some extent, discredited by both sides." Bayard Taylor”
― Iota Angel, The Island Beyond the Coast - Book II: A real-life journey set in Greece during the 19th century with Bayard Taylor & Mark Twain

“If art can’t make you feel better—after first making you feel worse—what good is it?”
― Edward Abbey, The Fool's Progress

“I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, How it Feels to be Colored Me