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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c2ad924 | I am often asked what keeps me going after all these years. I think it is the realization that there is no final struggle. Whether you win or lose, each struggle brings forth new contradictions, new and more challenging questions. As Alice Walker put it in one of my favorite poems: I must love the questions themselves as Rilke said like locked rooms full of treasures to which my blind and groping key does not yet fit.1 | Grace Lee Boggs | ||
| 0d5ce82 | The real revolution is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff. With raising a reading level from second grade to third. With simplifying history and writing it down (or reciting it) for the old folks. With helping illiterates fill out a food-stamps form - for they must eat, revolution or not. | revolution | Alice Walker | |
| fa27e9a | A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something. What can she become? I asked. Why, she said, the mother of his children. But I am not the mother of anybody's children, I said, and I am something. | Alice Walker | ||
| 94635ba | She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that "no" is a word the world never learned to say to her." | Alice Walker | ||
| af8b1e4 | She look me over from head to foot. Then she cackle. Sound like a death rattle. You sure is ugly, she say, like she ain't believed it. | Alice Walker | ||
| 3422fa8 | Today Americans, who used to feel welcomed wherever we went, travel abroad with trepidation. We know we are not trusted or liked, that we are even hated, by millions of people around the globe. We must ask ourselves why this is so and do the work of discovering our historical behavior toward the other countries and peoples of the planet. As disturbing as this will be, it is a first step toward a peaceful existence. Not because we can make p.. | Alice Walker | ||
| 1c9f5d0 | The world is changing, I said. It is no longer a world just for boys and men. Our women are respected here, said the father. We would never let them tramp the world as American women do. There is always someone to look after the Olinka woman. A father. An uncle. A brother or nephew. Do not be offended, Sister Nettie, but our people pity women such as you who are cast out, we know not from where, into a world unknown to you, where you must s.. | gender gender-inequality gender-stereotypes men-and-women women women-s-rights | Alice Walker | |
| 2fd2b90 | Choose someone to love who wouldn't even hear of it. | Alice Walker | ||
| 0eb7bc4 | I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is. | fish peaches | Alice Walker | |
| 6eb12e4 | What will people say, you running off to Memphis like you don't have a house to look after? Shug say, Albert. Try to think like you got some sense. Why any woman give a shit what people think is a mystery to me. Well, say Grady, trying to bring light. A woman can't git a man if peoples talk. Shug look at me and us giggle. Then us laugh sure nuff. Then Squeak start to laugh. Then Sofia. All us laugh and laugh. Shug say, Ain't they something?.. | lesbian | Alice Walker | |
| 1808bf6 | God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. | Alice Walker | ||
| fd27c10 | Shug Avery sat up in bed a little today. I wash and comb out her hair. She got the nottiest, shortest, kinkiest hair I ever saw, and I loves every strand of it. | afro-hair love romance | Alice Walker | |
| 4307740 | Anyway, Phillip isn't like that. From what I can see, Phillip has good judgement and he genuinely cares about me. And those might be rare qualities in seventeen-year-old boys these days. Not that I'm an expert. Although I am getting better at it. | Melody Carlson | ||
| 83fc7d2 | His mind took one of its odd jumps. He opened a clean page in his grimy notebook, and in the twig-divided shade of a wild cherry, infested with tent caterpillars, he began to make notes for a poem. | Saul Bellow | ||
| d12e928 | And the process started over again. Once more it was, Who are you? And I had to confess that I didn't know where to begin. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 6bbf35d | It was no joy waking up after a dream about that man. He left a taste of thunder in my mouth. | man thunder | Chaim Potok | |
| cda7225 | A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evil. Seen from the highest point of metaphysics. To a rational mind, nothing bad ever really happens. He was talking high-minded balls. Twaddle! I thought. I said, 'Oh? Do you mean that every gas chamber has a silver lining? | gallows-humour holocaust jewish metaphysics | Saul Bellow | |
| 17ee3f8 | Nobody should be a mystery intentionally. Unintentionally is mysterious enough. | Saul Bellow | ||
| a9ccc01 | But privately when things got very bad I often looked into books to see whether I could find some helpful words, and one day I read, "The forgiveness of sins is perpetual and righteousness first is not required." | Saul Bellow | ||
| ec5baca | Every twenty years or so the earth renews itself in young maidens. You know what I mean? Her cheeks had the perfect form that belongs to the young; her hair was kinky gold. Her teeth were white and posted on every approach. She was all sweet corn and milk. Blessings on her hips. Blessings on her thighs. Blessings on her soft little fingers which were somewhat covered by the cuffs of her uniform. Blessings on that rough gold. A wonderful lit.. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 0f47d10 | I suppose, he was thinking, that we heard this tale of the Herzogs ten times a year. Sometimes Mama told it, sometimes he. So we had a great schooling in grief. I still know these cries of the soul. They lie in the breast, and in the throat. The mouth wants to open wide and let them out. But all these are antiquities -- yes, Jewish antiquities originating in the Bible, in a Biblical sense of personal experience and destiny. What happened du.. | Saul Bellow | ||
| cea6c99 | We were friends, somehow. But in the end, somehow, he intended to be a mortal enemy. All the while that he was making the gestures of a close and precious friend he was fattening my soul in a coop till it was ready for killing | Saul Bellow | ||
| c3a947c | Socrates tried to soothe us, true enough. He said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born. This is not absolutely comforting either. Anyway it was natural that theology and philosophy should take the deepest interest in this. They owe it to us not to be boring themselves. On this obligation they don't always make good. However, Kierkegaar.. | ennui | Saul Bellow | |
| 9ea30d4 | Your authority and my degeneracy are one in the same. | law | Saul Bellow | |
| de67cca | She was cuckoo about dime stores, where she bought cosmetics and pins and combs. After we locked the expensive purchases in the station wagon we went into McCory's or Kresge's and were there by the hour, up and down the aisles with the multitude, mostly of women, and in the loud-played love music. Some things Thea liked to buy cheaply, they maybe gave her the best sense of the innermost relations of pennies and nickels and explained the rea.. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 07db373 | And I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 58ae1e1 | Going up, Herzong found a bouquet of violets, dropped from the hand of a woman. Perhaps a bride. Little perfume remained in them, but they made him remember... These violets smelled to him like female tears. He gave them a burial in the trash ca, hoping they had not dropped from a disappointed hand. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 332fcfe | The paltriness of these sexual struggles. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 8da90dc | he concluded, | Saul Bellow | ||
| 9465c85 | To him, perpetual thought of death was a sin. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. | Saul Bellow | ||
| af5f5ca | The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business. | the-ocean | Saul Bellow | |
| 173755c | In the peculiar fate of people that makes them fat and rich, when this happens very swiftly there is the menace of the dreamy state that plunders their reality. Let's say that anyway old age and death would come, so why shouldn't the passage be comfortable? But this proposal doesn't make a firm mind, in the strange area where things swim too fast. Against this trouble thought may be a remedy; force of person is another one, and money and bi.. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 189a139 | It's always easier to learn something than to use what you've learned. | Chaim Potok | ||
| 5e99c26 | A word is worth one coin, silence is worth two | Chaim Potok | ||
| cf9a617 | I do not know what evil is when it comes to art. I only know what is good art and what is bad art. | Chaim Potok | ||
| 9d41225 | Good-bye, Davita. Be discontented with the world. But be respectful at the same time. | Chaim Potok | ||
| 1b8294e | How should a Jew feel? There we went through the seven gates of hell for matzos. Here I stand in matzos over my head. So how should a Jew feel? You are an angel of God, and the Rebbe, he should live and be well, the Rebbe made miracles and wonders for me. At night, I tell myself it is a dream and I am afraid to wake up. If it is a dream, better I should not wake up, better I should die in my sleep. | matzos persecution survival torment | Chaim Potok | |
| d7b490f | Without stories there is nothing. Stories are the world's memory. The past is erased without stories. | Chaim Potok | ||
| a2f3290 | I'm too exhausted to sleep, | Ellen Datlow | ||
| c20a2f7 | If you're waiting for a special occasion to make your next trip happen, then consider this: The day you get off the couch and head for the airport, that's the special occasion. | Patricia Schultz | ||
| e517f21 | Grigsby had looked at him askance. "Why is it," he said, "that I have the distinct impression you're not surprised by this news?" 'Surprised by the fact that the reverend is first and foremost a human being? Surprised by the fact that every human being, reverend or ribald, can be undone by capricious circumstances? Or should I be surprised by the fact that a man who teaches love and forgiveness can love and forgive? Tell me, Marmy, exactl.. | love | Robert R. McCammon | |
| 6f25f40 | Hynm tkwn shban, fn ljsd lkhrjy hw m yhm, kyf tbdw khrjyan, wHynm tkbr ytrkz lhtmm `l~ m hw bldkhl, wytwqf lns `n lhtmm blkyfy@ lty tbdw `lyh. | Philip Roth | ||
| 3cb239f | Here is someone not set up for life's working out poorly, let alone for the impossible.But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy-that is every man's tragedy. | Philip Roth | ||
| 6b11940 | For hours after the three consecutive calls--and after the predictable banality and futility of the pep talk, after the attempt to revive the old esprit by reviving memories of his colleagues' lives, by trying to find things to say to buck up the hopeless and bring them back from the brink--what he wanted to do was not only to phone and speak to his daughter, whom he found in the hospital with Phoebe, but to revive his own esprit by phoning.. | Philip Roth |