I was trembling. I thought, if I do not open the door at once and get out of here, I am lost. But I knew I could not open the door, I knew it was too late; soon it was too late to do anything but moan. He pulled me against him, putting himself into my arms as though he were giving me himself to carry, and slowly pulled me down with him to that bed. With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.
We were a part of each other, flesh of each other’s flesh-which meant that we so took each other for granted that we never thought of the flesh.
Bloodlust is the only real tribute the mediocre are capable of bringing to the extraordinary.
I’ve got to accept limitations before I can discover my possibilities.
For him there was the back door, and the dark stairs, and the kitchen or the basement. This world was not for him.
Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology, as you put it, because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.
Then Leona surprised him. “You talking about that boy? He’s just bored and lonely, don’t know no better. You could probably make friends with him real easy if you tried.” He laughed. “Well, that’s what’s the matter with most people,” Leona insisted, plaintively, “ain’t got nobody to be with. That’s what makes them so evil. I’m telling you, boy, I know.
Judgment,” she said, “has nothing to do with love.
Of course, these liberals were not, as I was, forever being found by the police in the “wrong” neighborhood, and so could not have had first-hand knowledge of how gleefully a policeman translates his orders from above. But they had no right not to know that; if they did not know that, they knew nothing and had no right to speak as though they were responsible actors in their society; for their complicity with the patriots of that hour meant that the policemen were acting on their orders, too.
How strange and beautiful – it must be one of the few real reasons for remaining alive, of desiring to – to dance with your daughter, your son, and your wife; touching, really digging it, laughing, and keeping the beat, free.
I have more faith in Southerners than I will ever have in Northerners: the mighty and pious North could never, after all, have acquired its wealth without utilizing, brutally and consciously, those “folk” ways, and locking the South within them. And when this country’s absolutely inescapable disaster levels it, it is in the South and not in the North that the rebirth will begin.
And I am not being frivolous now, either. 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.
At the same time he realized how far they were above the city and the lights below seemed to be calling him. He walked to the balcony’s edge and looked over. Looking straight down, he seemed to be standing on a cliff in the wilderness, seeing a kingdom and a river which had not been seen before.
A man grows up when he looks back, realizes what has happened to him, accepts it all, and begins to change himself. He cannot grow up until he reaches this moment and passes it. We are now at the end of our extraordinarily prolonged adolescence. A very great poet, an American, Miss Marianne Moore, wrote, many years ago, the following description of our terrors: “The weak overcomes its menace. The strong overcomes itself.
I told her that I have loved her once and I made myself believe it.
One cannot argue with anyone’s experience or decision or belief.
He grasped me by the collar, wrestling and caressing at once, fluid and iron at once, saliva spraying from his lips and his eyes full of tears, but with the bones of his face showing and the muscles leaping in his arms and neck.
One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.
I remember the winter sun was shining and I felt cold and distant as the sun.
And the brief corner of the sky seems to be shrieking, though he does not hear a sound.