I’d have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.
That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.
Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.
Even sound seemed to fail in this air, like the air was worn out with carrying sounds so long.
That’s sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today.
She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.
Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view.
Our most treasured family heirloom is our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.
Gough never pretended to perfection or to sainthood – well, hardly ever. Although when he set off the metal detector at airport security, he would blame his aura.
I’m bad and I’m going to hell, and I don’t care. I’d rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.
I don’t care much for facts, am not much interested in them, you can’t stand a fact up, you’ve got to prop it up, and when you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it’s not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction.
People need trouble – a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it.
By artist I mean of course everyone who has tried to create something which was not here before him, with no other tools and material than the uncommer-ciable ones of the human spirit.
Whatever its symbol – cross or crescent or whatever – that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race.
Be scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid. Ain’t nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.
Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.
How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.
Did you ever have a sister? did you?
A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.
It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly.