Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.
One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.
Everything was as it had been between us, and at the same time everything was different.
It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs of my own country, for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores.
I thought she would be fun to have fun with.
For here you were, Big James, named for me – you were a big baby, I was not – here you were, to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.
And there was something so artless in this smile that I had to smile back.
Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception.
And the reason for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played – and play – in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know. The.
People make you pay for the way you look, which is also the way you think you look, and what time writes is a record of that collision.
The menfolk, they die, all right. And it’s us women who walk around, like the Bible says, and mourn. The menfolk, they die, and it’s over for them, but we women, we have to keep on living and try to forget what they done to us.
Wash me, cried the slave to his Maker, and I shall be whiter, whiter than snow!
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. 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, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
She was so incredibly beautiful – she seemed to be wearing the sunlight, rearranging it around her from time to time, with a movement of one hand, with a movement of her head, and with her smile – that, when she paid the man and started out of the store, I started out behind her.
The mind is like an object that picks up dust. The object doesn’t know, any more than the mind does, why what clings to it clings.
Maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker,” said Giovanni, as though he had not heard me, “and so you can stand less and less.
We’re getting old, he thought, and it damn sure didn’t take long.
No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think that I will ever love anyone like that again. And this might be a great relief if I did not also know that, when the knife has fallen, Giovanni, if he feels anything will feel relief.
This equation has placed our cities among the most dangerous in the world and has placed our youth among the most empty and most bewildered. The situation of our youth is not mysterious. Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models. That is exactly what our children are doing. They are imitating our immorality, our disrespect for the pain of others.
You smiled at me the way you smiled at everyone, you told me what you told everyone – and you tell nothing but lies. What are you always hiding? And do you think I did not know when you made love to me, you were making love to no one? No one! Or everyone – but not me, certainly. I am nothing to you, nothing, and you bring me fever but no delight.