Tell me,’ he said, ’what is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. What are they waiting for?
And no matter what I was doing, another me sat in my belly, absolutely cold with terror over the question of my life.
She thought of herself as his strength; in a world of shadows, the indisputable reality to which he could always repair. And, again, for all that had come, she could not regret this. She had tried, but she had never been and was not now, even tonight, truly sorry. Where, then, was her repentance? And how could God hear her cry?
I must – to be honest – add that my ministry almost certainly helped me through my adolescence by giving me something larger than myself to be frightened about.
For all policemen were bright enough to know who they were working for, and they were not working, anywhere in the world, for the powerless.
The effort not to know what one knows is the most corrupting effort one can make –.
In order to change a situation one has first to see it for what it is.
I knew the tension in me between love and power, between pain and rage, and the curious, the grinding way I remained extended between these poles – perpetually attempting to choose the better rather than the worse.
The dream of safety dies hard.
When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I felt that I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus, in telling them to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life.
Beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudeness, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.
Our power and our fear of change help bind these people to their misery and bewilderment, and insofar as they find this state intolerable we are intolerably menaced.
You mean I have a home to go to as long as I don’t go there?” He laughed. “Well, isn’t it true? You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.” “I seem,” I said, “to have heard this song before.” “Ah, yes,” said Giovanni, “and you will certainly hear it again. It is one of those songs that somebody somewhere will always be singing.
I think that people can be better than that, and I know that people van be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.
At this point too, it may be suggested, the legend of Paris has done its deadly work, which is, perhaps, so to stun the traveler with freedom that he begins to long for the prison of home – home then becoming the place where questions are not asked.
I am too various to be trusted. If this were not so I would not be alone in this house tonight.
Out of joy strength came, strength that was fashioned to bear sorrow: sorrow brought forth joy. Forever? This was Ezekiel’s wheel, in the middle of the burning air forever – and the little wheel ran by faith, and the big wheel ran by the grace of God.
Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum – that is, any reality – so supremely difficult.
Giovanni looked at me. And this look made me feel that no one in my life had ever looked at me directly before.
I mean, I think you’ve got to be truthful about the life you have. Otherwise, there’s no possibility of achieving the life you want.