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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d380870 | It's funny about people. Just before something happens, you almost know what it is. You do know what it is, I believe. You just haven't had the time--and now you won't have the time--to say it to yourself. | James Baldwin | ||
| 568555f | If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have needed to invent and could never have become so dependent on what they still call "the Negro problem." This problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them; and this not from anything blacks may or may not be doing but because of the role a guilty and constricted white imaginat.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 45e6188 | Malcolm considered himself to be the spiritual property of the people who produced him. He did not consider himself to be their saviour, he was far too modest for that, and gave that role to another; but he considered himself to be their servant and in order not to betray that trust, he was willing to die, and died. Malcolm was not a racist, not even when he thought he was. His intelligence was more complex than that; furthermore, if he had.. | James Baldwin | ||
| b20b438 | People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior | James Baldwin | ||
| 2e6de66 | His body, which I had come to know so well, glowed in the light and charged and thickened the air between us. Then something opened in my brain, a secret, noiseless door swung open, frightening me: it had not occurred to me until that instant that, in fleeing from his body, I confirmed and perpetuated his body's power over me. | James Baldwin | ||
| f1038f4 | Freedom is hard to bear. It can be objected that I am speaking of political freedom in spiritual terms, but the political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of that nation. We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know, and the American dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international lev.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 44095b2 | The paradox, and a fearful paradox it is, is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere on any continent as long as he is unwilling to accept his past. To accept one's past--one's history--is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought. | James Baldwin | ||
| 7d58c47 | Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs; | James Baldwin | ||
| f909de4 | To accept one's past--one's history--is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought. | James Baldwin | ||
| f9283ee | They are just dirty, all of them, low and cheap and dirty.' He stretched out his hand and pulled me down to the floor beside him. 'All except you. Tous, sauf toi.' He held my face between his hands and I supposed such tenderness has scarcely ever produced such terror as I then felt. 'Ne me laisse pas tomber, je t'en prie,' he said, and kissed me, with a strange insistent gentleness on the mouth. | James Baldwin | ||
| ce4813c | We should certainly know by now that it is one thing to overthrow a dictator or repel an invader and quite another thing really to achieve a revolution. Time and time and time again, the people discover that they have merely betrayed themselves into the hands of yet another Pharaoh, who, since he was necessary to put the broken country together, will not let them go. Perhaps, people being the conundrums that they are, and having so little d.. | James Baldwin | ||
| 59c4bfd | Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the on.. | James Baldwin | ||
| c8d0f38 | The innocent brightness of a new-born day Is lovely yet: The clouds that gather round the setting sun 19 Do take a sober coloring from an eye That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality; Another race hath been, and other palms are won. | James Baldwin | ||
| 233c0e7 | To Americans, time always sounds like a parade chez vous [at your house], a triumphant parade, like armies with banners entering a town . . . as though with enough time and all that fearful energy and virtue you people have, everything will be settled, solved, put in its place. . . . I mean all the serious, dreadful things, like pain and death and love, in which you Americans do not believe. | James Baldwin | ||
| 64a7b81 | I feel in myself now a faint, a dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then, great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst. But out of this astounding, intolerable pain came joy; we gave each other joy that night. | james-baldwin literature | James Baldwin | |
| 16af428 | The Americans have no sense of doom, none whatever. They do not recognize doom when they see it. | americans blind cultural doom giovanni-s-room james-baldwin | James Baldwin | |
| 2e19a82 | The world should listen then, as I am listening now. | James Baldwin | ||
| a65941d | The breathing instruments inspire, Wake into voice each silent string, And sweep the sounding lyre! In a sadly pleasing strain, 2 Let the warbling lute complain: Let the loud trumpet sound, Till the roofs all around The shrill echoes rebound; While in more lengthen'd notes and slow, The deep, majestic, solemn organs blow. Hark! the numbers soft and clear Gently steal upon the | James Baldwin | ||
| 0f7b468 | He made me think of home--perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. | James Baldwin | ||
| a21b676 | Swifter far than summer's flight, Swifter far than youth's delight, Swifter far than happy night, Art thou come and gone: As the earth when leaves are dead, As the night when sleep is sped, As the heart when joy is fled, I am left alone, alone. | James Baldwin | ||
| 402c1c0 | Oh, Karamazov, I am deeply unhappy. | existential kolya | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | |
| 1e5de73 | This is a formula for a nation's or a kingdom's decline, for no kingdom can maintain itself by force alone. Force does not work the way its advocates seem to think it does. It does not, for example, reveal to the victim the strength of his adversary. On the contrary, it reveals the weakness, even the panic of his adversary, and this revelation invests the victim with patience. Furthermore, it is ultimately fatal to create too many victims. .. | James Baldwin | ||
| eb47ee2 | 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. | James Baldwin | ||
| 2dfb844 | People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility | James Baldwin | ||
| 0780aae | Jean Chappe spent months travelling to Siberia by coach, boat and sleigh, nursing his delicate instruments over every perilous bump, only to find the last vital stretch blocked by swollen rivers, the result of unusually heavy spring rains, which the locals were swift to blame on him after they saw him pointing strange instruments at the sky. Chappe managed to escape with his life, but with no useful measurements. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 5e45af9 | When at last he reached home, eleven and a half years after setting off, and having achieved nothing, he discovered that his relatives had had him declared dead in his absence and had enthusiastically plundered his estate. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2cc12f9 | her cheeks a slight Asian red; | Ned Vizzini | ||
| 83f9929 | 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, | Mindy Kaling | ||
| 75a2a00 | A smile for all the stupid people out there with bleeding hearts for serial killers. | Robert Cormier | ||
| e5ca29a | These boots were made for dancing"(260)" | Michael Dorris | ||
| abb7d5d | Without somebody to watch me, laugh at my jokes, tell me what to do, ask me questions, race me to the river, make me guess the names of birds, or challenge me to count the silvery fish in a school, there was nothing for me to do. Without somebody to be somebody to, it was as though I wasn't somebody myself. | identity | Michael Dorris | |
| 1f4092e | The World Bank, anxious that the last vestiges of Zimbabwe's former inclination toward socialism be abandoned, successfully urged the imposition of a token tuition charge for all grade levels. Equivalent to one U. S. dollar per year per child, this fee constitutes a burden to the poorest families, who have responded by sending only boys to classes. Too many of the girls . . . have resorted to prostitution in order to eat. | education free public | Michael Dorris | |
| 2e55309 | Annabelle will be impressed if I say yes. I'll be different in her eyes, dumb maybe, but worth knowing. | Michael Dorris | ||
| e80a883 | If I took my time, sampled every possibility, eventually I'd hit on the perfect combination and come into my own. | Michael Dorris | ||
| 0c7cf1b | The Statute of Artificers of 1563 laid down that all artificers (craftsmen) and laborers "must be and continue at their work, at or before five of the clock in the morning, and continue at work, and not depart, until between seven and eight of the clock at night"--giving an eighty-four-hour workweek." | Bill Bryson | ||
| a9ef70a | On a cooler sun on a primordial earth: "I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as the 'Chinese Resaturant Problem'--because we has a dim sun." | science | Bill Bryson | |
| b2c1eb4 | Portability also explains why many old chests and trunks had domed lids- to throw off water during travel. The great drawback of trunks, of course, is that everything has to be lifted at to get things at the bottom. It took a remarkably long time- till the 1600s- before it occurred to anyone to put drawers in and thus convert trunks into chests of drawers. | history trunks | Bill Bryson | |
| 80f5cd4 | General admission for groundlings--those who stood in the open around the stage--was a penny. Those who wished to sit paid a penny more, and those who desired a cushion paid another penny on top of that--all this at a time when a day's wage was 1 shilling (12 pence) or less a day. The money was dropped into a box, which was taken to a special room for safekeeping--the box office. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 3cc1806 | Now, aware of my invisibility, I live rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century, which I discovered when I was trying to escape in the night from Ras the Destroyer. But that's getting too far ahead of the story, almost to the end, although the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead. | Ralph Ellison | ||
| f0e12e2 | Dr. Gordon S. Seagrave, the famous "Burma Surgeon." | Ralph Ellison | ||
| 6f13f05 | One central characteristic of the Model T now generally forgotten is that it was the first car of consequence to put the driver's seat on the left-hand side. Previously, nearly all manufacturers placed the driver on the outer, curb-side of the car so that an alighting driver could step out onto a grassy verge or dry sidewalk rather than into the mud of an unpaved road. Ford reasoned that this convenience might be better appreciated by the l.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| ecb1c76 | And so one more to the wandering road. Beyond Blackheath the highway began a steep and curvaceous descent towards Lithgow, where it skirted along hem of the mountains... | Bill Bryson | ||
| cd5bf73 | This is where these writers placed their bets, striking a dangerous balance between silence and art. How do writers and readers find each other under such dangerous circumstances? Reading, like writing, under these conditions is disobedience to a directive in which the reader, our Eve, already knows the possible consequences of eating that apple but takes a bold bite anyway. How does that reader find the courage to take this bite, open that.. | Edwidge Danticat | ||
| 075852d | They were very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality upon me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me. | Ralph Ellison |