I do a lot of rewriting. It’s very painful.
The Americans have no sense of doom, none whatever. They do not recognize doom when they see it.
To smash something is the ghetto’s chronic need. Most of the time it is the members of the ghetto who smash each other, and themselves. But as long as the ghetto walls are standing there will always come a moment when these outlets do not work.
Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be. I do not think, for example, that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world – which allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and white – owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged.
The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic – a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall.
He was waiting, I think, for me to cross that space and take him in my arms again – waiting, as one waits at a deathbed for the miracle one dare not disbelieve, which will not happen.
Let us say, then, that truth, as used here, is meant to imply a devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment; freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted.
But it is part of the business of the writer – as I see it – to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source.
People find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
They say the kids are dumb and so they’re teaching them to work with their hands. Those kids aren’t dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure that they don’t get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
Lord, that Hollywood train, forever coming round the bend!
The dead man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one’s own destruction. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.
Then the door is before him. There is darkness all around him, there is silence in him. Then the door opens and he stands alone, the whole world falling away from him. And the brief corner of the sky seems to be shrieking, though he does not hear a sound. Then the earth tilts, he is thrown forward on his face in darkness, and his journey begins.
It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it.
In the first place, as the homeless wanderers of the twentieth century prove, the question of nationality no longer necessarily involves the question of allegiance. Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.
He made me think of home – perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
There are tears on his face, his face or mine, I don’t know. I kiss him where our tears fall. I start to say something. He puts one finger on my lips. He smiles his little smile.
I was often allowed to watch them drink their cocktails.
There is often something beautiful, there is always something awful, in the spectacle of a a person who has lost one of his faculties, a faculty he never questioned until it was gone, and who struggles to recover it. Yet people remain people, on crutches or indeed on deathbeds...
Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously ragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world’s experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed, the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness; and she saw, with a dreadful reluctance why this effort was so rare.