The most futile thing a man can do is to ponder the alternatives, to stew and fret over the life that might have been lived if circumstances had not pointed his future in a certain direction.
That the word indescribable should present itself is not fortuitous, since it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient afflictio...
Tamtej jesieni, kiedy mój organizm stopniowo ulegał coraz większemu rozregulowaniu, zacząłem rozumieć, że mój umysł jest jak archaiczna ręczna centrala telefoniczna w małym miasteczku zalewana stopnio...
Somehow I still could not believe that this life we all have together would ever be changed.
She was determined to put behind her the madness of the past—or as much as a vulnerable and memory-racked mind permitted—
Maybe that’s the key to happiness—being sort of dumb, not wanting to know any of the answers.
It is I am sure a kind of unorthodoxy, and considered thus by some, I hear my master say (I resume my station, still flustered and with a madly working heart), but it is my conviction that the more re...
I don’t see any point in trying to equate one evil with another, or to assign some stupid scale of values. They’re both awful! Would
Hell, they’d say in the country club locker room, you know how Milt’s getting his. Everybody knew, bearing testimony to the fact that suburban vice, like a peeling nose, is almost impossible to concea...
For me the real healers were seclusion and time.
Dress is important. It's part of being human. It might as well be a thing of beauty, something you take real pleasure in doing. And maybe in the process, give other people pleasure. Though that's seco...
They appeared from where I stood as peaceful as two lovers who had gaily costumed themselves for an afternoon stroll, but on impulse had decided to lie down and nap, or kiss and make love, or merely w...
What I had begun to discover is that, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the grey drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. B...
To make matters worse, I was out of a job and had very little money and was self-exiled to Flatbush—like others of my countrymen, another lean and lonesome Southerner wandering amid the Kingdom of the...
The danger is especially apparent if the young person is affected by what has been termed incomplete mourning—has, in effect, been unable to achieve the catharsis of grief, and so carries within himse...
My mother, alone among all the Negroes at Turner’s Mill, had been laid honorably to rest in the family plot among white folks (scant yards away, indeed, from the unsentimental Benjamin, now spinning i...
I thought there's something to be said for honor in this world where there doesn't seem to be any honor left. I thought that maybe happiness wasn't really anything more than the knowledge of a life we...
I came to absorb the history of the Virginia Tidewater—that primordial American demesne where the land was sucked dry by tobacco, laid waste and destroyed a whole century before golden California beca...
But oh, my brothers, black folk ain’t never goin’ to be led from bondage without they has pride! Black folk ain’t goin’ to be free, they ain’t goin’ to have no spoonbread an’ sweet cider less’n they s...
Aushwitze itself remains explicable. The most profound statement yet made upon Aushwitz was not a statement at all, but a response. The query, 'At Aushwitze, tell me, where was God?'And the answer: 'W...