Wherever you look there’s meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss. A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear – and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed – stupid and mean.
In the face of brutality I was prudent. Before injustice I held my peace. I sacrificed the things in hand for the good of they hypothetical whole. I believed in the tongue instead of the fist. As an armor against oppression I taught patience and faith in the human soul I know now how wrong I was. I have been a traitor to myself and to my people. All that is not. Now is the time to act and to act quickly. Fight cunning with cunning and might with might.
We live in the richest country in the world. There’s plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want. And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle – the freedom, equality, and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start? There are corporations worth billions of dollars – and hundreds of thousands of people who don’t get to eat.
He waited for the black, terrible anger as though for some beast out of the night. But it did not come to him. His bowels seemed weighted with lead, and he walked slowly and lingered against fences and the cold, wet walls of buildings by the way. Descent into the depths until at last there was no further chasm below. He touched the solid bottom of despair and there took ease.
We all of us somehow caught. We born this way or that way and we don’t know why. But we caught any how. I was born Berenice. You Born Franky. John Henry born John Henry. And maybe we wants to widen and bust free. But no matter what we do we still caught. Me is me and you is you and he is he. We each one of us somehow caught all by ourself. I’m caught worse than you is. Because I’m Black, because I’m colored.
It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.
He had a few eccentricities himself and was tolerant of the peculiarities of others; indeed, he rather relished the ridiculous.
It was almost three o’clock, the most stagnant hour in the day or night.
The quiet room was too peaceful and comfortable to worry in.
The mutual distrust between the men who were just awakened and those who were ending a long night gave everyone a feeling of estrangement.
She had always kept things to herself. That was one sure truth.
By the moonlight he watched his wife for the last time. His hand sought the adjacent flesh and sorrow paralleled desire in the immense complexity of love.
Leonora Penderton feared neither man, beast, nor the devil; God she had never known.
The love she felt was so hard that she had to squeeze him to her until her arms were tired.
The loneliness in him was so keen that he was filled with terror. Usually he had a pint of bootleg white lightning. He drank the raw liquor and by daylight he was warm and relaxed.
Singer never knew just how much his friend understood of all the things he told him. But it did not matter.
With her it was like there was two places – the inside room and the outside room.
April that year came sudden and still, and the green of the trees was a wild bright green. The pale wistarias bloomed all over town, and silently the blossoms shattered. There was something about the green trees and the flowers of April that made Frankie sad. She did not know why she was sad, but because of this peculiar sadness, she began to realize she ought to leave the town.
For we were thinking of freedom. That’s the word like a worm in my brain. Yes? No? How much? How little? The word is a signal for piracy and theft and cunning. We’ll be free and the smartest will then be able to enslave the others. But! But there is another meaning to the word. Of all words this one is the most dangerous. We who know must be wary. The word makes us feel good – in fact the word is a great ideal. But it’s with this ideal that the spiders spin their ugliest webs for us.
I go all around and try to tell them. And they laugh. I can’t make them understand anything. No matter what I say I can’t seem to make them see the truth.