You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.
That summer, in any case, all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me into the church.
Ain’t no such thing as a little fault or a big fault. Satan get his foot in the door, he ain’t going to rest till he’s in the room. You is in the Word or you ain’t–ain’t no halfway with God.
…all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me…
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.
The power to define the other seals one’s definition of oneself.
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. (p. 81)
That the world calls morality is nothing but the dream of safety. That’s how the world gets to be so fucking moral. The only way to know that you are safe is to see somebody else in danger-otherwise you can’t be sure if you’re safe.
I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.
…they ain’t never met nobody they didn’t lie to and steal from.
If you know from whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations on where you can go.
Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free.
We held each other so close that we might indeed have been one body.
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
All art is a kind of confession more or less oblique. All artists if they are to survive are forced at last to tell the whole story to vomit the anguish up.
All art is a kind of confession more or less oblique. All artists if they are to survive are forced at last to tell the whole story to vomit the anguish up.
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders but they have never failed to imitate them.
Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.
Experience which destroys innocence also leads one back to it.
Most people in action are not worth very much and yet every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
Money it turned out was exactly like sex you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.
This world is white no longer and it will never be white again.
Money it turned out was exactly like sex you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.
It is a great shock at the age of 5 or 6 to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.
We take our shape it is true within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.
I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.