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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 138fd7b | Time could not be bought. The only coin time accepted was life. | James Baldwin | ||
| 800a860 | Maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker," said Giovanni, as though he had not heard me, "and so you can stand less and less." | giovanni-s-room james-baldwin life weakened weaker | James Baldwin | |
| ab05cbd | You smiled at me the way you smiled at everyone, you told me what you told everyone--and you tell nothing but lies. What are you always hiding? And do you think I did not know when you made love to me, you were making love to no one? No one! Or everyone--but not me, certainly. I am nothing to you, nothing, and you bring me fever but no delight. | James Baldwin | ||
| 2dc955c | Of course, I must say that I don't think America is God's gift to anybody - if it is, God's days have got to be numbered. That God these people say they serve- and do serve, in ways that they don't know- has got a very nasty sense of humor. Like you'd beat the shit out of Him, if He was a man. Or: if you were. | James Baldwin | ||
| 36690c0 | He smiled, "Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home." He played with my thumb and grinned. " ?" "Beautiful logic," I said. "You mean I have a home to go to as long as I don't go there?" He laughed. "Well, isn't it true? You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you nev.. | giovanni-s-room home james-baldwin paradox | James Baldwin | |
| b9043df | To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one's interior argument and collaboration with the authors of one's degradation. It abruptly reduces the white enemy to a contest merely physical, which he can win only physically. | imperialism james-baldwin no-name-in-the-street post-imperialism | James Baldwin | |
| 8775f54 | In Harlem, Negro policemen are feared more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it | discrimination harlem negro police-brutality | James Baldwin | |
| e2b7299 | But I know about suffering; if that helps. I know that it ends. I ain't going to tell you no lies, like it always ends for the better. Sometimes it ends for the worse. You can suffer so bad that you can be driven to a place where you can't ever suffer again: and that's worse. | James Baldwin | ||
| 2bacde8 | I was thinking, no doubt, of our nights in bed, of the peculiar innocence and confidence, which will never come again, which had made those nights so delightful, so unrelated to past, present, or anything to come, so unrelated, finally, to my life since it was not necessary for me to take any but the most mechanical responsibility for them. And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no one to watch, no penalties attache.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 465b470 | How come you forget English when you swear? | Scott Westerfeld | ||
| ba4e76a | With no music to listen to, I just biked around in circles talking to myself like a kid on the cover of a Robert Cormier young adult novel, circling around puzzled Jewish families walking back to their cars. This is how I learned to ride a bike. | Mindy Kaling | ||
| 5ad2b4b | At some point in life, we learn our limitations, the distances we can we can travel and the boarders we will never cross. And we go from there. | Robert Cormier | ||
| 754bbd9 | Go get your bus, square boy. | Robert Cormier | ||
| 29fbdf2 | And in order for the Negro to fulfill his duty as a citizen it was often necessary that he fight for his self-affirmed right to fight. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 1aa23ea | But on the other hand, it would be a great mistake to assume that the dead are absolutely powerless. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| bdb8601 | They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their own voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves and I'd help them. I laughed. Here I had thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either color or men . . . For all they were concerned, we were so many names scribbled on fake ballots, to be used at their con.. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| c5c1c9b | Times are grave and you seem very indignant. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 605bf42 | That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 5a65531 | The moment I entered the bright, buzzing lobby of Men's House I was overcome by a sense of alienation and hostility ... The lobby was the meeting place for various groups still caught up in the illusions that had just been boomeranged out of my head: college boys working to return to school down South; older advocates of racial progress with utopian schemes for building black business empires; preachers ordained by no authority except their.. | business disillusionment illusion progress race | Ralph Ellison | |
| 92bf04e | I can hear you say, "What a horrible, irresponsible bastard!" And you're right. I leap to agree with you. I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me? And wait until I reveal how truly irresponsible I am. Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a f.. | blind invisible-black-men invisible-man racism-in-america racists | Ralph Ellison | |
| 2cda6cc | Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever more and brighter light. The truth is the light and light is the truth. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| add32b9 | Here are the facts. He was standing and he fell. He fell and he kneeled. He kneeled and he bled. He bled and he died. He tell in a heap like any man and his blood spilled out like any blood; red as any blood, wet as any blood and reflecting the sky and the buildings and birds and trees, or your face if you'd looked into its dulling mirror -- and it dried in the sun as blood dries. That's all. They spilled his blood and he bled. They cut him.. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 23d6254 | That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their INNER eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. | blind invisible-black-men invisible-man racism-in-america racists | Ralph Ellison | |
| 924512c | I wanted peace and quiet, tranquillity, but was too much aboil inside. Somewhere beneath the load of the emotion-freezing ice which my life had conditioned my brain to produce, a spot of black anger glowed and threw off a hot red light of such intensity that had Lord Kelvin known of its existence, he would have had to revise his measurements. A remote explosion had occurred somewhere, perhaps back at Emerson's or that night in Bledsoe's off.. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 941df4a | There's money, and then there's class. | Kate Jacobs | ||
| cedb5bb | Let me, however, although no verbal critic, protest against the profanation of the word friend. In this my history I must be honest, make a distinction between the oriental diamond and its worthless imitation of paste, and separate the grain from the chaff -- gossamer words, that weigh nothing, from substantial realities heavier than gold. | friendship friendship-true-and-loyal | Edward John Trelawny | |
| d701ec1 | Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, like diamonds we are cut with our own dust. | John Webster | ||
| dd79b9b | Remember, please remember, you do not (you must not!) fear, attack, or hate the False Self. That would only continue a negative and arrogant death energy, and it is delusional and counterproductive anyway. It would be trying to "drive out the devil by the prince of devils," as Jesus puts it. In the great economy of grace, all is used and transformed, and nothing is wasted. God uses your various False Selves to lead you beyond them. Note tha.. | Richard Rohr | ||
| b43fa0c | This picture of a hot early stage of the universe was first put forward by the scientist George Gamow in a famous paper written in 1948 with a student of his, Ralph Alpher. Gamow had quite a sense of humor--he persuaded the nuclear scientist Hans Bethe to add his name to the paper to make the list of authors "Alpher, Bethe, Gamow," | Stephen Hawking | ||
| d61eb2e | It is well known that theoretical physicists cannot handle experimental equipment; it breaks whenever they touch it. Pauli was such a good theoretical physicist that something usually broke in the lab whenever he merely stepped across the threshold. | George Gamow | ||
| d75d36a | I don't believe in honors, it bothers me, honors bother, honors is epaulettes, honors is uniforms. My papa brought me up this way. I can't stand it, it hurts me. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 2f5f0b8 | it is our capacity to doubt that will determine the future of civilization. | Richard Feynman | ||
| d741680 | The other great heritage is Christian ethics--the basis of action on love, the brotherhood of all men, the value of the individual, the humility of the spirit. These two heritages are logically, thoroughly consistent. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| cd3604d | This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There's a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you! | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| ba2509a | What a contrast--the person sitting at the table gets this nice cake on a doilied plate, while the pantry man back there with the stubby thumbs is saying, 'Damn deez doilies!'" So that was the difference between the real world and what it looked like." -- | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 9bc90aa | there is a physical problem that is common to many fields, that is very old, and that has not been solved. It is not the problem of finding new fundamental particles, but something left over from a long time ago--over a hundred years. Nobody in physics has really been able to analyze it mathematically satisfactorily in spite of its importance to the sister sciences. It is the analysis of circulating or turbulent fluids. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 460f7dc | Western civilization, it seems to me, stands by two great heritages. One is the scientific spirit of adventure--the adventure into the unknown, an unknown that must be recognized as unknown in order to be explored, the demand that the unanswerable mysteries of the universe remain unanswered, the attitude that all is uncertain. To summarize it: humility of the intellect. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 218e2ab | It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best--summing it all up--without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed. | Richard Feynman | ||
| 7901dd6 | But that was my big moment: I gave a seminar in the biology department at Harvard! I always do that, get into something and see how far I can go. I | Richard Feynman | ||
| 3fe0d17 | If you try once or twice to communicate and get pushed back, pretty soon you decide, "To hell with it." | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 7f90b84 | Another time somebody gave a talk about poetry. He talked about the structure of the poem and the emotions that come with it; he divided everything up into certain kinds of classes. In the discussion that came afterwards, he said, "Isn't that the same as in mathematics, Dr. Eisenhart?" Dr. Eisenhart was the dean of the graduate school and a great professor of mathematics. He was also very clever. He said, "I'd like to know what Dick Feynman.. | Richard P. Feynman | ||
| 61cd893 | Take this neat little equation here. It tells me all the ways an electron can make itself comfortable in or around an atom. That's the logic of it. The poetry of it is that the equation tells me how shiny gold is, how come rocks are hard, what makes grass green, and why you can't see the wind. And a million other things besides, about the way nature works. | feynman fine-structure-constant mathematics nature physics | Richard Feynman | |
| 74e78f4 | Paul Olum] was president of the University of Oregon when he heard of [Richard] Feynman's death. He realized that the young genius he had met at Princeton had become a part of him, impossible to extricate. "My wife died three years ago, also of cancer," he said. ... I think about her a lot. I have to admit I have Dick's books and other things of Dick's. I have all of the Feynman lectures and other stuff. And there are things that have pict.. | Jame Gleick quoting Paul Olum | ||
| afdfdba | The adult Feynman asked: If all scientific knowledge were lost in a cataclysm, what single statement would preserve the most information for the next generations of creatures? | James Gleick |