Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life
Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour - and in the oddest places! - for the lack of it.
It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.
It will be hard James but you come from sturdy peasant stock men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity You come from a long line of great poets some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said "The very time I thought I was lost My dungeon shook and my chains fell off." You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you James and Godspeed.
You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.
Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.
But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.
The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.
But, when the chips are down, its better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.
The American ideal is, after all, that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.
All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.
Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.
Love is like the lightning, and your maturity is signaled by the extent to which you can accept the dangers and the power and the beauty of love.
For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
To be with God is really to be involved in some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you.
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