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Quotes by Writer
"There are seeds of self-destruction in all of us that will bear only unhappiness if allowed to grow."
24
"Think of all the really successful men and women you know. Do you know a single one who didn't learn very young the trick of calling attention to himself in the right quarters?"
24
"It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this."
24
"Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character."
24
"They stood there, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, Ruler of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs and Presidents, trying to understand what it meant to own a world and how big a world really was."
24
"We're all fools," said Clemens, "all the time. It's just we're a different kind each day. We think, I'm not a fool today. I've learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact we're not perfect and live accordingly."
24
"The election of Donald Trump confirmed everything I knew of my country and none of what I could accept. The idea that America would follow its first black president with Donald Trump accorded with its history. I was shocked at my own shock. I had wanted Obama to be right.I still want Obama to be right. I still would like to fold myself into the dream. This will not be possible."
24
"Remember your name. Remember that you and I are brothers, are the children of trans-Atlantic rape. Remember the broader consciousness that comes with that. Remember that this consciousness can never ultimately be racial; it must be cosmic."
24
"Altruism holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only moral justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty. The political expression of altruism is collectivism or statism, which holds that man's life and work belong to the state - to society, to the group, the gang, the race, the nation - and that the state may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good."
24
"Even if I knew for certain that I would never have anything published again, and would never make another cent from it, I would still keep on writing."
24
"How is it that we remember the least triviality that happens to us and yet not remember how often we have recounted it to the same person?"
24
"But there's a beginning in an end, you know? It's true that you can't reclaim what you had, but you can lock it up behind you. Start fresh."
24
"Mob law is the most forcible expression of an abnormal public opinion; it shows that society is rotten to the core."
24
"The black world was expanding before me, and I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. 'White America' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, 'white people' would cease to exist for want of reasons."
24
"Well, we come here to the Fastnesses mostly to learn what questions not to ask.""But you're the Answerers!""You don't see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?""No""""To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question."
24
"Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure."
24
"The pretty fellows you speak of, I own entertain me sometimes, but is it impossible to be diverted with what one despises? I can laugh at a puppet show, at the same time I know there is nothing in it worth my attention or regard."
24
"Lena was going down the list of John's attributes in her mind, a list I was hoping wasn't too long. 'He could see and hear and smell things I couldn't.'Link inhaled deeply, then coughed. 'Dude, you really need a shower."
24
"Love was selfish, wasn't it? It made honest men want things they had no right to. It cocooned one from the rest of the world, erased time itself, knocked away reason. It made you live in defiance of the inevitable. It made you want another's mind, body; it made you feel as if you deserved to own their heart, and carve out a place in it."
24
"He completely lacked any ardent interest that might have occupied his mind. His interior life was impoverished, had undergone a deterioration so severe that it was like the almost constant burden of some vague grief. And bound up with it all was an implacable sense of personal duty and the grim determination to present himself at his best, to conceal his frailties by any means possible, and to keep up appearances. It had all contributed to making his existence what it was: artificial, self-conscious, and forced-until every word, every gesture, the slightest deed in the presence of others had become a taxing and grueling part in a play."
24
"When I get through tearing a lobster apart, or one of those tender West Coast octopuses, I feel like I had a drink from the fountain of youth."
24
"I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism - those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes."
24
"He became convinced that ordinary commercial financing could be done for a service charge plus an insurance fee amounting to much less that the current rates of interest charged by banks, whose rates were based on supply and demand, treating money as a commodity rather than as a sovereign state's means of exchange."
24
"Be charitable and indulgent to every one but thyself."
24
"Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds."
24
"It eases my soul that I share a house with [Cassandra King] a novelist of such rare and distinctive gifts."
24
"The world turns aside to let any man pass who knows whither he is going."
24
"I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing."
23
"I wish nights like this weren't so fragile and slippery and impossible to nail down for study in one's leisure. But the really great nights pass through you like whispers or shadows. They shimmer, but don't adhere."
23
"We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains."
23
"The heart is forever making the head its fool."
23
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