His smile made me feel a little foolish.
You accept life as it is, you see it as it is before you can change it.
With the best will in the world, no one now living could undo what past generations had accomplished. The great question was what, exactly, had they accomplished: whether the evil, of which there had been so much, alone lived after them, whether the good, and there had been some, had been interred with their bones.
There are so many ways to tell the truth.
We had got on badly, partly because we shared, in our different fashions, the vice of stubborn pride.
There have been superficial changes, with results at best ambiguous and, at worst, disastrous. Morally, there has been no change at all and the moral change is the only real one.
The great buildings, unlit, blunt like the phallus or sharp like the spear, guarded the city which never slept. Beneath them Rufus walked, one of the fallen – for the weight of this city was murderous – one of those who had been crushed on the day, which was every day, these towers fell. Entirely alone, and dying of it, he was part of an unprecedented multitude.
But to try and find out what Americans mean is almost impossible because there are so many things they do not want to face.
I will smile at you when you wake up.
And, in fact, the truth about the black man, as a historical entity and as a human being, has been hidden from him, deliberately and cruelly; the power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
Again, the terms “civilized” and “Christian” begin to have a very strange ring, particularly in the ears of those who have been judged to be neither civilized nor Christian, when a Christian nation surrenders to a foul and violent orgy, as Germany did during the Third Reich.
I had been well conditioned by the world in which I grew up, so I did not yet dare take the idea of becoming a writer seriously.
I have no wish to stay here,” he said, “in this wretched mausoleum of a country. Let us go to New York. I will make my future there. There is no future here, for a boy like me.
Men have to think about so many things. Women only have to think about men.
It was the hour when darkness begins, when the sounds of the night begin.
We moved in a silence which was music from everywhere.
Honey,” he said, “you ain’t no bigger than a minute.” She sighed. “Sometimes a minute can be a mighty powerful thing.
Nor can you get a meal anywhere in the South without being confronted with “grits”; a pale, lumpy, tasteless kind of porridge which the Southerner insists is a delicacy but which I believe they ingest as punishment for their sins.
And you, heretic! Where is she? Where is the queen?” “Have you checked your ass? I heard it’s pretty roomy in there.” I spat blood, moving to hands and knees. I still had the Spear of Nine Spheres wrapped in one tight-knuckled fist, for all the good it was doing me. “You are in no position to sling insults.” The masked Mata Argis Agent had a cold voice, dark with anger. “Where is she!? What have you done to her?!” “The same thing I do to your mom every night.
You come up to my sternum,” Suri drawled back. “Anything below tit-height is a kid or a dwarf.