The world should listen then, as I am listening now.
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.
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.
The moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare; Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair;.
History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we are literally criminals.
Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself! And terrifying that the terms of love are so rigorous, its checks and liberties so tightly bound together.
If you look helpless, people react to you in one way and if you look strong, or just come on strong, people react to you in another way, and, since you don’t see what they see, this can be very painful.
I’m beginning to think,′ she said, ‘that growing means learning more and more about anguish. That poison becomes your diet – you drink a little of it everyday. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t stop seeing it – that’s the trouble. And it can, it can’ – she passed her hand wearily over her brown again – ’drive you mad.
No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think that I will ever love anyone like that again.
I suppose this to mean that the song is still needed, still has work to do.
I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright.
She moved in a silent ferocity of dignity which barely escaped being ludicrous.
It would help if I were able to feel guilty. But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt.
When a tradition has been evolved, whatever the tradition is, the people, in general, will suppose it to have existed from before the beginning of time and will be most unwilling and indeed unable to conceive of any changes in it. They do not know how they will live without those traditions that have given them their identity. Their reaction, when it is suggested that they can or that they must, is panic. And we see this panic, I think, everywhere in the world today.
I know I can’t help you very much right now – God knows what I wouldn’t give if I could. But I know about suffering; if that helps. I know that it ends.
Life is tragic, and therefore unutterably beautiful.
This is the message that has spread through streets and tenements and prisons, through the narcotics wards, and past the filth and sadism of mental hospitals to a people from whom everything has been taken away, including, most crucially, their sense of their own worth. People cannot live without this sense; they will do anything whatever to regain it. This is why the most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose.
His face was bigger than the world, his eyes deeper than the sun, more vast than the desert, all that had ever happened since time began was in his face.
Where I was in the world. I mean, what I’m made of. Anyway, Giovanni’s Room is not really about homosexuality. It’s the vehicle through which the book moves. Go Tell It on the Mountain, for example, is not about a church, and Giovanni is not really about homosexuality. It’s about what happens to you if you’re afraid to love anybody. Which is much more interesting than the question of homosexuality.
It is not simply the relationship of oppressed to oppressor, of master to slave, nor is it motivated merely by hatred; it is also, literally and morally, a blood relationship, perhaps the most profound reality of the American experience, and we cannot begin to unlock it until we accept how very much it contains of the force and anguish and terror of love.