Best advice I ever got was an old friend of mine, a black friend, who said you have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all. That’s the only advice you can give anybody. And it’s not advice, it’s an observation.
They knew that no one heard, that bloodless people cannot be made to bleed. So they blew what everyone had heard before, they reassured everyone that nothing terrible was happening, and the people at the tables found it pleasant to shout over this stunning corroboration and the people at the bar, under cover of the noise they could scarcely have lived without, pursued whatever it was they were after.
And everything was different. I was walking through streets I had never seen before. The faces around me, I had never seen. We moved in silence which was music from everywhere.
I yet contend that the mobs in the streets of Hitler’s Germany were those in the streets not by the will of the German state, but by the will of the western world, including those architects of human freedom, the British...
Perhaps he is a fool and a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
When a dark face opens, light seems to go everywhere.
But the Irish became white when they got here and began rising in the world, whereas I became black and began sinking.
He had never seen the beauty of black people before. But, staring at Ida, who stood before the window of the Harlem kitchen, seeing that she was no longer merely his younger sister but a girl who would soon be a woman, she became associated with the colors of the shawl, the colors of the sun, and with a splendor incalculably older than the gray stone of the island on which they had been born.
The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you.
In a society that is entirely hostile, and, by its nature, seems determined to cut you down – that has cut down so many in the past and cuts down so many every day – it begins to be almost impossible to distinguish a real from a fancied injury. One can very quickly cease to attempt this distinction, and, what is worse, one usually ceases to attempt it without realizing that one has done so.
There is still, for me, no pathos quite like the pathos of those multicolored, worn, somehow triumphant and transfigured faces, speaking from the depths of a visible, tangible, continuing despair of the goodness of the Lord.
In my mind, the effort to become a great novelist simply involves attempting to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, and then a little more. It is an effort which, by its very nature – remembering that men write the books, that time passes and energy flags, and safety beckons – is obviously doomed to failure. “Success” is an American word which cannot conceivably, unless it is defined in an extremely severe, ironical, and painful way, have any place in the vocabulary of any artist.
Writers are extremely important people in a country, whether or not the country knows it. The multiple truths about a people are revealed by that people’s artists – that is what the artists are for.
It is, thus, perfectly possible – indeed, it is common – to act on the genuine results of the event, at the same time that the memory manufactures quite another one, an event totally unrelated to the visible and uncontrollable effects in one’s life. This may be why we appear to learn absolutely nothing from experience, or may, in other words, account for our incoherence: memory does not require that we reconstitute the event, but that we justify it.
What the times demand, and in an unprecedented fashion, is that one be – not seem – outrageous, independent, anarchical. That one be thoroughly disciplined – as a means of being spontaneous. That one resist at whatever cost the fearful pressures placed on one to lie about one’s own experience. For in the same way that the writer scarcely ever had a more uneasy time, he has never been needed more.
And as the boat-head wound along The willowy hills and fields among, They heard her singing her last song, The Lady of Shalott. Heard a carol, mournful, holy, Chanted loudly, chanted lowly, Till her blood was frozen slowly, And her eyes were darkened wholly, Turned to towered Camelot; For ere she reached upon the tide The first house by the water-side, Singing in her song she died, The Lady of Shalott.
Little breezes dusk 3 and shiver Through the wave that runs forever By the island in the river Flowing down to Camelot; Four gray walls, and four gray towers, Overlook a space of flowers, And the silent isle imbowers The Lady of Shalott.
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs;.
The innocent brightness of a new-born day Is lovely yet: The clouds that gather round the setting sun 19 Do take a sober coloring from an eye That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality; Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
I steal by lawns and grassy plots, I slide by hazel 6 covers; I move the sweet forget-me-nots That grow for happy lovers. I slip, I slide, I gloom, 7 I glance, Among my skimming swallows; I make the netted sunbeams dance Against my shady shallows.