Great Throughts Treasury

"Dickens has not seen it all. The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their only weapon against life, life is all that they have. This is why the dispossessed and starving will never be convinced (though some may be coerced) by the population-control programs of the civilized. I have watched the dispossessed and starving laboring in the fields which others own, with their transistor radios at their ear, all day long: so they learn, for example, along with equally weighty matters, that the pope, one of the heads of the civilized world, forbids to the civilized that abortion which is being, literally, forced on them, the wretched. The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their ?vital interests? are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the ?sanctity? of human life, or the ?conscience? of the civilized world. There is a ?sanctity? involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it. Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child?s arrival but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the ?vital interest? of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child. However?I could not have said any of this then, nor is so absurd a notion about to engulf the world now. But we were all starving children, after all, and none of our fathers, even at their most embittered and enraged, had ever suggested that we ?die out.? It was not we who were supposed to die out: this was, of all notions, the most forbidden, and we learned this from the cradle. Every trial, every beating, every drop of blood, every tear, were meant to be used by us for a day that was coming?for a day that was certainly coming, absolutely certainly, certainly coming: not for us, perhaps, but for our children. The children of the despised and rejected are menaced from the moment they stir in the womb, and are therefore sacred in a way that the children of the saved are not. And the children know it, which is how they manage to raise their children, and why they will not be persuaded?by their children?s murderers, after all?to cease having children."

"Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?"

"Don?t think I don?t know you love me. You believe we going to make it?"

"Don?t you see how unjust it was to wait for me to find it out? To put all the burden on me? I had the right to expect to hear from you?women are always waiting for the man to speak."

"Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him--he may be forced to--but nothing will efface his origins, the marks of which he carries with him everywhere. I think it is important to know this and even find it a matter for rejoicing, as the strongest people do, regardless of their station. On this acceptance, literally, the life of a writer depends."

"Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black."

"Every white person in this country-and I do not care what he or she says-knows one thing. They may not know, as they put, what I want, but they know they would not like to be black here."

"Elisha,' he said, 'no matter what happens to me, where I go, what folks say about me, no matter what anybody says, you remember - please remember - I was saved. I was there."

"Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it."

"Everything in life depends on how that life accepts its limits."

"Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities."

"Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it."

"Everything was as it had been between us, and at the same time everything was different."

"Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality."

"Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks."

"For I am?or I was?one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all?a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named?but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey?s bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well?by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion."

"Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair."

"For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."

"For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become."

"For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."

"For the rebirth of the soul was perpetual; only rebirth every hour could stay the hand of Satan."

"For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom."

"Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did."

"Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated ? in the main, abominably ? because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires."

"Giovanni smiled his humble, grateful smile and told me in as many ways as he could find how wonderful it was to have me there, how I stood, with my love and my ingenuity, between him and the dark. Each day he invited me to witness how he had changed, how love had changed him, how he worked and sang and cherished me. I was in a terrible confusion. Sometimes I thought, but this is your life. Stop fighting it. Stop fighting. Or I thought, but I am happy, And he loves me. I am safe. Sometimes, when he was not near me, I thought, I will never let him touch me again. Then, when he touched me, I thought it doesn't matter, it is only the body, it will soon be over. When it was over I lay in the dark and listen to his breathing and dreamed of the touch of hands, of Giovanni's hands, or anybody's hands, hands which would have the power to crash me and make me whole again."

"Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."

"Giovanni had awakened an itch, had released a gnaw in me. I realized it one afternoon, when I was taking him to work via the Boulevard Montparnasse. We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and the spectacle we presented, two grown men jostling each other on the wide sidewalk and aiming the cherry pits, as though they were spitballs, into each other's faces, must have been outrageous. 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."

"hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the one who hated, and this is an immutable law...I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense that once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain."

"He did not seem to know enough about the people in his novel. They did not seem to trust him. They were all named, more or less, all more or less destined, the pattern he wished them to describe was clear to him. But it did not seem clear to them. He could move them about but they themselves did not move. He put words in their mouths which they uttered sullenly, unconvinced. With the same agony, or greater, with which he attempted to seduce a woman, he was trying to seduce his people: he begged them to surrender up their privacy. And they refused - without, for all their ugly intransigence, showing the faintest desire to leave him. They were waiting for him to find the key, press the nerve, tell the truth."

"Have you been to the police?? Richard asked. ?Yes.? She made a gesture of disgust and rose and walked to the window. ?They said it happens all the time ? colored men running off from their families. They said they?d try to find him. But they don?t care. They don?t care what happens ? to a black man!? ?Oh, well, now,? cried Richard, his face red, ?is that fair? I mean, hell, I?m sure they?ll look for him just like they look for any other citizen of this city.? She looked at him. ?How would you know? I do know ? know what I?m talking about. I say they don?t care ? and they don?t care.? ?I don?t think you should look at it like that."

"Hatred is always self-hatred, and there is something suicidal about it."

"He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."

"He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all."

"He was one of those people who, quick to laugh, are slow to anger; so that their anger, when it comes, is all the more impressive, seeming to leap from some unsuspected crevice like a fire which will bring the whole house down."

"He stood for a moment on the melting snow, distracted, and then began to run down the hill, feeling himself fly as the descent became more rapid, and thinking: I can climb back up. If it?s wrong, I can always climb back up."

"He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be, forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any stranger. Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment."

"He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That's the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die."

"Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are."

"Here was the South Side--a million in captivity--stretching from this doorstep as far as the eye could see. And they didn't even read; depressed populations don't have the time or energy to spare. The affluent populations, which should have their help, didn't as far as could be discovered, read, either--they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn: in order to learn new attitudes."

"His touch could never fail to make me feel desire; yet his hot, sweet breath also made me want to vomit."

"Hope? The word seemed to bang from wall to wall. Hope? No, I don't think there's any hope. We're too empty here...She touched her heart. This isn't a country at all, it's a collection of football players and Eagle Scouts. Cowards. We think we're happy. We're not. We're doomed."

"History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about."

"How can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?"

"How can one... dream of power in any other terms than in the symbols of power?"

"I am what time, circumstance, and history have made of me, certainly, but I am also much more than that. So are we all."

"I am not trying to be m‚chant when I talk about women. I respect women?very much?for their inside life, which is not like the life of a man."

"I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again."

"I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them."

"I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do."

"I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others."