I doesn’t do any good to fight with Sonny. Sonny just moves back, inside himself, where he can’t be reached.
People said that he was very nice, but I confess that his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people’s stomachs. They might not mind so much if monkeys did not- so grotesquely- resemble human beings.
When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white man who is being, reluctantly and bloodily, separated from the land, and the African who is still attempting to digest or to vomit up the Bible.
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nation, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
I remembered that life in that room seemed to be occuring beneath the sea, time flowed past indiffrently above us, hours and days had no meaning.
It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians and, although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians is you.
Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden,” Jacques said. And then: “I wonder why.
If men don’t know what’s happening, what they’re doing, where they’re going – what are women to do? If Richard doesn’t know what kind of world he wants, how am I to help him make it? What am I to tell our sons?
You face reality, not the lights. The lights go off as quickly as they come on.
I went down again. My heart and I went down again. I was aware of her hand. I was aware of my breathing. I could no longer see it, but I was aware of her face.
Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom. One thing about the bottom, he told himself, you can’t fall any further. He tried to take comfort from this thought. Yet there knocked in his heart the suspicion that the bottom did not really exist.
People are full of surprise, even for themselves, if they have been stirred enough.
And yet – when one begins to search for the crucial, the definitive moment, the moment which changed all others, one finds one-self pressing, in great pain, through a maze of false signals and abruptly locking doors.
She, who had descended with such joy and pain, had begun her upward climb – upward, with her baby, on the steep, steep side of the mountain.
John’s heart was hardened against the Lord. His father was God’s minister, the ambassador of the King of Heaven, and John could not bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father.
The woman on the bed was old, her life was fading as the mist rose. She thought of her mother as already in the grave; and she would not let herself be strangled by the hands of the dead. “I’m going, Ma,” she said. “I got to go.
If your countrymen think that privacy is a crime, so much the worse for your country.
I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni’s room.
There were hardly any coloured people in the town I grew up in – how am I to know?’ And she hated herself for her next question, but she could not hold it back: ‘Don’t you think I deserve some credit, for trying to be human, for not being a part of all that, for – walking out?
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.