Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963

A Prayer in Spring

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
But which it only needs that we fulfill.

Edith Wharton, 1862 - 1937

*“Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.”

*“In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”

*“Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well-you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me.”

*“It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.”

*“Life is always either a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.”

*“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”

*“If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.”

*“I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting.”

*“Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.”

*“My little dog—a heartbeat at my feet.”

*“Each time you happen to me all over again. ”

*“There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.”

*“If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.”

*Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

*How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be ''American'' before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?

*I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

Ambrose Bierce, 1842 - 1913

Essayist and short-story writer Ambrose Bierce was born near Horse Cave Creek, Ohio (1842). He took a job as a printer's assistant on an antislavery newspaper when he was fifteen, and then became the second person in his county to volunteer for the Union Army at the outbreak of the Civil War.
He fought in some of the bloodiest battles of the war, including the Battle of Shiloh. During one short campaign, more than a third of his company was killed. But Bierce rose to the level of lieutenant, becoming an expert in typography. Then, in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, he was shot in the head. He later wrote about being shipped to the hospital on a flatcar in a rainstorm, surrounded by hundreds of moaning injured soldiers. He survived, but his friends and family said that injury changed him forever, made him bitter and suspicious.
He headed out west to San Francisco, which was a boomtown of 60,000 people, full of outlaws, gamblers, sailors, and goldmine millionaires. It was also a city full of writers, with six newspapers covering city life. One of the writers who had gotten started around the same time as Bierce was Mark Twain. But Bierce managed to make a name for himself writing fierce social criticism and satire.
He also wrote short stories about the Civil War, some of the bleakest war stories ever written. Bierce's most famous story is "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," about a spy condemned to die by hanging, only to escape when the rope snaps. He runs through the forest, away from enemy gunfire, and eventually finds his home plantation, and is about to embrace his wife when he feels a blow on his neck, and it turns out the whole escape was a daydream in the split second before his death.
One of Bierce's books that's never gone out of print is his Devil's Dictionary (1906), a collection of ironic definitions. The Devil's Dictionary includes the definitions:

"Bride. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her."

"Saint. A dead sinner revised and edited."

Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892. Song of the Open Road

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill'd with them, and I will fill them in return.)

From "Song of Myself," by Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892, from Poetry and Prose (Library of America).

52

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). Cornhuskers. 1918.

Sunset From Omaha Hotel Window


INTO the blue river hills
The red sun runners go
And the long sand changes
And to-day is a goner
And to-day is not worth haggling over. 5

Here in Omaha
The gloaming is bitter
As in Chicago
Or Kenosha.

The long sand changes. 10
To-day is a goner.
Time knocks in another brass nail.
Another yellow plunger shoots the dark.

Constellations
Wheeling over Omaha 15
As in Chicago
Or Kenosha.

The long sand is gone
and all the talk is stars.
They circle in a dome over Nebraska. 20

Wendell Berry, 1934 -

Goods

It's the immemorial feelings
I like the best: hunger, thirst,
their satisfaction; work-weariness,
earned rest; the falling again
from loneliness to love;
the green growth the mind takes
from the pastures in March;
the gayety in the stride
of a good team of Belgian mares
that seems to shudder from me
through all my ancestry.

Looking at the Sky by Anne Porter

I never will have time
I never will have time enough
To say
How beautiful it is
The way the moon
Floats in the air
As easily
And lightly as a bird
Although she is a world
Made all of stone.

I never will have time enough
To praise
The way the stars
Hang glittering in the dark
Of steepest heaven
Their dewy sparks
Their brimming drops of light
So fresh so clear
That when you look at them
It quenches thirst.

Eudora Welty, 1909 - 2001

Writer Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi (1909). Her mother was a schoolteacher, and Welty learned to love books before she was even able to read them. She said, "It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass."

She tried working in advertising but said, "It was too much like sticking pins into people to make them buy things they didn't need or really want." So she became a writer.

Though she wrote several novels, including The Optimist's Daughter (1972), she's best known for her short stories in collections such as The Wide Net (1943) and The Golden Apples (1949). She wrote and rewrote, revising her stories by cutting them apart with scissors at the dining-room table and reassembling them with straight pins.

Her story "Why I Live At the PO" begins, "I was getting along fine with Mama, Pap-Daddy and Uncle Rondo until my sister Stella-Rondo just separated from her husband and came back home again. Mr. Whitaker! Of course I went with Mr. Whitaker first, when he first appeared here in China Grove, taking 'Pose Yourself' photos, and Stella-Rondo broke us up. Told him I was one-sided. Bigger on one side than the other, which is a deliberate, calculated falsehood: I'm the same. Stella-Rondo is exactly twelve months to the day younger than I am and for that reason she's spoiled."

A critic once asked Welty to explain where she got the idea for a marble cake in one of her stories. She replied, "It's a recipe that's been in my family for some time."

*A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.

*Beware of a man with manners.

*Greater than scene is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.

*I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

*It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.

*Never think you've seen the last of anything.

*The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.

*The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.

*Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.

*To imagine yourself inside another person... is what a storywriter does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

*Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.

*Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

*Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.

James Patrick (J.P.) Donleavy, 1926 -

Novelist James Patrick (J.P.) Donleavy, was born in Brooklyn, New York (1926). He was in the Navy in World War II, then went off to Trinity College, Dublin, on the GI bill. His first novel, The Ginger Man (1955), was included in the Modern Library's list of the 100 best works of fiction of the twentieth century; in Ireland it's the seventh best-selling book of all time. He became an Irish citizen in 1967.

*When you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When you have both, it's health, you worry about getting ruptured or something. If everything is simply jake then you're frightened of death.

*Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

*When I die I want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs in Dublin.

*All I want is one break which is not my neck.

*I got disappointed in human nature as well and gave it up because I found it too much like my own.

Maya Angelou, 1928 -

Touched by an Angel


We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.

Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.

We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love's light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.

The Thousand-foot Ore Boat by Barton Sutter

To live until we die—
The job seems just impossible.
The great weight of the past
Pushing us forward, the long future
Thrust out before us, and so little room to either side!
The least we can do is stay sober,
Look sharp. The thousand-foot ore boat
Slides through the ship canal
And eases beneath the bridge,
All engines thrumming,
Including the pilot's heart.

Philip Roth, 1933 -

Novelist Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey (1933). He grew up in a crowded Jewish neighborhood, and he always loved listening to the conversations of his neighbors. He said, "In warm weather, people sat on the stoops and on beach chairs in the driveways. [At night] you'd be sweating, trying to sleep, and you'd hear them, you'd hear their conversation all the time, and it would be very comforting."

At an early age, he began to rebel against the expectations of his community, where all the parents demanded that their kids would become successful doctors and lawyers without losing touch with their cultural roots. He said, "Newark [was] the battleground ... between the European family of immigrants ... who clung to the rigorous orthodoxy and the [American] children who wanted to be rid of all that because they sensed immediately that it was useless in this society."

He went on to the University of Chicago to study English literature, and it was there that he began to write his first short stories. He published his first book, the collection of short stories Goodbye Columbus, in 1959, and it got good reviews and won several awards. He came out with his big best seller, Portnoy's Complaint, 10 years later in 1969. He has gone on to write many more novels, including American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000). His most recent novel is Everyman (2006).

Philip Roth said, "I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you — it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists."


*History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

*I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.

*Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

*A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!

*It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.

*Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.

*Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

*Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

*When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.

*My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets— no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!
Portnoy's Complaint

Gwendolyn Brooks, 1917 - 2000

Truth

And if sun comes
How shall we greet him?
Shall we not dread him,
Shall we not fear him
After so lengthy a
Session with shade?

Though we have wept for him,
Though we have prayed
All through the night-years—
What if we wake one shimmering morning to
Hear the fierce hammering
Of his firm knuckles
Hard on the door?

Shall we not shudder?—
Shall we not flee
Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter
Of the familiar
Propitious haze?

Sweet is it, sweet is it
To sleep in the coolness
Of snug unawareness.

The dark hangs heavily
Over the eyes.

Absenteeism - WARNING!

Warning! Those students who do not show up in the class without any legitimate reason are warned that a large portion of the final grade depends on your class participation. In other words absenteeism will have dire consequences on your academic record!