SF MT U.S. American Exam Quotes

Narrator on stories in Ceremony

"I will tell you something about stories…they aren't just enteratinment."

Grandma on stories

"It seems I heard these stories before…only thing is, the names are different."

Betonie on cures

"'There are some things we can't cure like we used to,' he said. 'Not since the white people came.'"

Narrator on white people in Ceremony

"It was the white people who had nothing…never able to forget that their pride was wrapped in something stolen, something that had never been and could never be, theirs."

Time in Ceremony

"The world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time."

Silko

"I think of storytelling as a part of healing. The body of healing stories and storytelling are held communally and are practiced together and always have been."

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

"The history of the United States is a history of settler-colonialism…Today's indigenous nations and communities are sociates formed by their resistance to colonialism through which they have carried their practices and histories."

Ghostwriter on America

"In a country where possessions counted for everything, we had no belongings except our stories."

Ghostwriter and her brother

"'Why did I live and you die?'…'You died too,' he said. 'You just don't know it.'"

Boy's parents' experience

"Their relatives' experience and their own had taught my parents to believe that no country was immune to disaster."

Boy's mother adapting

"'Go buy,' she said in English…her voice took on a higher pitch, as if instead of coming from inside her, the language was outside, squeezing her by the throat."

Claire's soul

"I have a Vietnamese soul."

Carver on flying

"There was a reason he loved flying. Almost everything looked more beautiful from a distance…but seen up close, from this height, the countryside was so poor that the poverty was neither picturesque nor pastoral."

Claire repenting

"I think I have found someplace where I can do some good and make up for some of the things you've done."

Matthew Le Mahieu

"Nuanced considerations of refugee experience and thought, as characters contend with present situations in the United States and in Vietnam, partly by reflecting on ways to remember, forget, uncover, or invent their pasts."

Viet Thanh Nguyen

"There are undoubtedly limitations to identity, and so my work is about how to incorporate identity and examine its limitations at the same time in order to imagine a politics and aesthetics that gets us to revolution."

Wilderness in The Crucible

"The edge of wilderness was close by…it stood, dark and threatening, over their shoulders night and day."

Proctor on law

"Common vengeance writes the law."

Danforth on his reputation

"Postponement now speaks a floundering on my part."

Miller

"I believe the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history."

Emory Elliot

"We must be aware of our enemies who plot to destroy us; we must acknowledge the gap between our ideals and our current realities;…we must work together to restore our superiority among the world's nations."

Merricat on the men in the village

"In this village the men stayed young and did the gossiping and the women aged with grey evil weariness and stood silently waiting for the men."

Merricat on hatred

"The people of this village have always hated us."

Jim Donell

"[Jim Donell] took off his hat saying CHIEF…raised his arm and smashed the rock through one of the great tall windows of our mothers drawing room…First the boys…then the other men and at last the women and smaller children, they moved like a wave at our house."

Uncle Julian

"I shall commence…with a slight exaggeration and go on from there into an outright lie."

Lynette Carpenter

"Women's forceful establishment of power over their own lives, threatens a society in which men hold primary power and leads inevitably to confrontation."

Karen J. Hall

"Constance and Merricat must be represented in a way which will serve a function in the patriarchal system; they become witches, monsters used to frighten children by day and adults by night back into the boundaries of acceptable, obedient behavior."