I am saying that a journey is called that because you cannot know what you will discover on the journey, what you will do with what you find, or what you find will do to you.
Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception. It is up to the American writer to find out what these laws and assumptions are. In a society much given to smashing taboos without thereby managing to be liberated from them, it will be no easy matter.
Men are men, and sometimes they must be left alone.
And in Uncle Tom’s Cabin we may find foreshadowing of both: the formula created by the necessity to find a lie more palatable than the truth has been handed down and memorized and persists yet with a terrible power.
I think it’s better to know that you don’t know, that way you can grow with the mystery as the mystery grows in you. But, these days, of course, everybody knows everything, that’s why so many people are so lost.
Me, I want to escape,′ he had told me, ‘Je veux m’evader – this dirty world, this dirty body. I never wish to make love again with anything more than the body.
One cannot argue with anyone’s experience or decision or belief. All my evidence would be thrown out of court as irrelevant to the main body of the case, for I could cite only exceptions. The South Side proved the justice of the indictment; the state of the world proved the justice of the indictment. Everything else, stretching back throughout recorded time, was merely a history of those exceptions who had tried to change the world and had failed.
He laughed. ‘Baby. Baby. Baby. I love you. And I’m going to build us a table and a whole lot of folks are going to be eating off it for a long, long time to come.
Yet, in Florence’s heart tonight hatred and bitterness weighed like granite, pride refused to abdicate from the throne it had held so long. Neither love nor humility had led her to the altar, but only fear.
And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon. And, watching his face, I realized that it meant much to me that I could make his face so bright. I saw that I might be willing to give a great deal not to lose that power. And I felt myself flow toward him, as a river rushes when the ice breaks up.
She smiled. “I been thinking,” she said, “how you better commence to tremble when the Lord, He gives you your heart’s desire.
But what I mean about being a woman is, we might get married now and stay married for fifty years and I might be a stranger to you every instant of that time and you might never know it.
If one can live with one’s own pain then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.
To ‘come along’ meant that he would change his ways and consent to be the husband she had traveled so far to find. It was he who, unforgivably, taught her that there are people in the world for whom ‘coming along’ is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
He didn’t like his sisters and I didn’t have any brothers. And so we got to be, for each other, what the other missed.
It’s painful, sometimes, to look back on a life and wonder if anything you did could have made any difference. So much is lost; and what’s lost is lost forever. Was it destined to be lost, or could we have saved it?
And I also felt, standing so close to him, feeling such a passion to keep him from terror, that a decision – once again! – had been taken from my hands. For neither my father nor Hella was real at that moment. And yet even this was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me, nothing would ever be real for me again – unless, indeed, this sensation of falling was reality.
Yet, hope – the hope that we, human beings, can be better than we are – dies hard; perhaps one can no longer live if one allows that hope to die. But it is also hard to see what one sees. One sees that most human beings are wretched, and, in one way or another, become wicked: because they are so wretched.
Now – now, of course, I see something very beautiful in those days, which were such torture then. I felt, then, that Giovanni was dragging me with him to the bottom of the sea.
I wanted to do something to his cheerful, hideous, worldly face which would make it impossible for him ever again to smile at anyone the way he was smiling at me.