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disceautdiscede · 1 month
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We cling to a time and a place because without them man is lost, not only man but life. [...] It is as though all living creatures, and particularly the more intelligent, can survive only by fixing or transforming a bit of time into space or by securing a bit of space with its objects immortalized and made permanent in time.
-Loren Eiseley, The Brown Wasps
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disceautdiscede · 2 months
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It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one's own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength.
-James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
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disceautdiscede · 2 months
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Blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one's own destruction. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.
-James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
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disceautdiscede · 2 months
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It was the Lord who knew of the impossibility every parent in that room faced: how to prepare the child for the day when the child would be despised and how to create in the child - by what means? - a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself.
-James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
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disceautdiscede · 2 months
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I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.
-James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
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disceautdiscede · 2 months
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He had lived and died in an intolerable bitterness of spirit and it frightened me, as we drove him to the graveyard through those unquiet, ruined streets, to see how powerful and overflowing this bitterness could be and to realize that this bitterness now was mine.
-James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
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disceautdiscede · 2 months
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It came to me...that for extremely stupid people anti-Semitism was a form of intellectuality, the sole form of intellectuality of which they were capable. It represented, in a rudimentary way, the ability to make categories, to generalize. [...] From this, it would seem, followed the querulous obstinacy with which the anti-Semite clung to his concept; to be deprived of this intellectual tool by missionaries of tolerance would be...the equivalent of Western man's losing the syllogism: a lapse into animal darkness.
-Mary McCarthy, Artists in Uniform
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disceautdiscede · 2 months
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At once the difficulty, and the hope, of our special time in this world of Western Europe and America is that we have been brought up for many generations in the belief, however tacit, that all humanity was almost unanimously engaged in going forward, naturally to better things and to higher reaches.
-Katherine Anne Porter, The Future is Now
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disceautdiscede · 2 months
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The silence of the spaces between the stars does not affright me, as it did Pascal, because I am unable to imagine it except poetically; and my awe is not for the silence and space of the endless universe but for the inspired imagination of man, who can think and feel so, and turn a phrase like that to communicate it to us.
-Katherine Anne Porter, The Future is Now
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disceautdiscede · 2 months
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Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it.
-Robert Frost, The Figure a Poem Makes
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disceautdiscede · 2 months
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A school boy may be defined as one who can tell you what he knows in the order in which he learned it. The artist must value himself as he snatches a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic.
-Robert Frost, The Figure a Poem Makes
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disceautdiscede · 2 months
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The conclusion is come to that like giants we are always hurling experience ahead of us to pave the future with against the day when we may want to strike a line of purpose across it for somewhere.
-Robert Frost, The Figure a Poem Makes
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disceautdiscede · 2 months
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No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew.
-Robert Frost, The Figure a Poem Makes
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disceautdiscede · 2 months
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This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
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disceautdiscede · 2 months
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I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy and a tragic attitude toward tragedy - why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
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disceautdiscede · 2 months
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But at three o'clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn't work - and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
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disceautdiscede · 2 months
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I realized that in those two years, in order to preserve something - an inner hush maybe, maybe not - I had weaned myself from all the things I used to love - that every act of life from the morning toothbrush to the friend at dinner had become an effort. I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
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