On this particular night, we were free and we had decided to treat ourselves to a really fancy, friendly dinner. There we were, at the table, all dressed up, and we’d ordered everything, and we were h...
One day, Richard would turn to me, with the light of sudden understanding on his face, and say, Oh, that’s what you mean. And then, so ran the dream, a great and invaluable dialogue would have begun....
One of the most terrible, most mysterious things about a life is that a warning can be heeded only in retrospect: too late.
Our people have functioned in this country for nearly a century as political weapons, the trump card up the enemies' sleeve; anything promised Negroes at election time is also a threat leveled at the...
Out of joy strength came, strength that was fashioned to bear sorrow: sorrow brought forth joy. Forever? This was Ezekiel's wheel, in the middle of the burning air forever -- and the little wheel ran...
People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is t...
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...
Perhaps we were, all of us -pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children -bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run; if so, wi...
Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself... I think now that if I had had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent...
Shalott?
She did not know why he so adored things that were so long dead; what sustenance they gave him, what secrets he hoped to wrest from them. But she understood, at least, that they did give him a kind of...
She was so incredibly beautiful—she seemed to be wearing the sunlight, rearranging it around her from time to time, with a movement of one hand, with a movement of her head, and with her smile—that, w...
She, who had descended with such joy and pain, had begun her upward climb—upward, with her baby, on the steep, steep side of the mountain.
Some escaped the trap, most didn't. Those who got out always left something of themselves behind, as some animals amputate a leg and leave it in the trap. It might be said, perhaps, that I had escaped...
Some moments in a life, and they needn’t be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest...
Some of the things written during those years, justifying, for example, the execution of the Rosenbergs, or the crucifixion of Alger Hiss (and the beatification of Whittaker Chambers) taught me someth...
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. It is this individual u...
Swifter far than summer's flight, Swifter far than youth's delight, Swifter far than happy night, Art thou come and gone: As the earth when leaves are dead, As the night when sleep is sped, As the hea...
THE SOLITARY REAPER. Behold her, single in the field, Yon solitary highland lass! Reaping and singing by herself; Stop here, or gently pass! Alone she cuts and binds the grain, And sings a melancholy...
Tell me,' he said, 'what is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait. What are they waiting for?
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