b > b's Quotes

“... I was certain that if I ran hard enough ... I would find myself back in the raw heart of time, that point of detachment, and be beat out again, with nothing at all behind me.”
― Allen Barnett, The Body and Its Dangers & Other Stories

“His head is full of shit, but his bowels are dry.”
― Christopher Bram, Father of Frankenstein

“And I stood shoulder to shoulder with a tall apple-cheeked boy who loved and trusted me.”
― Christopher Bram, Father of Frankenstein

“This book made me think about my own life, and then it made me feel glad for my—”
― Samuel D. Hunter, The Whale

“You got to make up your own life, alone.”
― Christopher Bram, Father of Frankenstein

“Until today, sex hasn’t been a possibility, so it hasn’t been a temptation. He is sorry he enjoyed it so much, because it squanders the passion he needs to climb out of common life into the greater world.”
― Christopher Bram, Father of Frankenstein

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

“Let your weeping be bitter and your wailing fervent; then be comforted for your sorrow. Find in grief the abandon you used to find in love; grieve the way you used to fuck.”
― Allen Barnett, The Body and Its Dangers & Other Stories

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I told myself all the way to Philadelphia that I did not have to justify my mourning. One is responsible for feeling something and being done with it.”
― Allen Barnett, The Body and Its Dangers & Other Stories

“Give sorrow occasion and let it go, or your heart will imprison you in constant February, a chain-link fence around frozen soil, where your dead will stack in towers past the point of grieving. Let your tears fall for the dead, and as one who is suffering begin the lament . . . do not neglect his burial.”
― Allen Barnett, The Body and Its Dangers & Other Stories

“If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.- Toni Morrison”
― Sean Liburd

“I guess it takes a holy man to make a girl a real whore.”
― James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

“There are people in the world for whom "coming along" is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.”
― James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

“The menfolk, they die, all right. And it's us women who walk around, like the Bible says, and mourn. The menfolk, they die, and it's over for them, but we women, we have to keep on living and try to forget what they done to us.”
― James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

“John’s heart was hardened against the Lord. His father was God’s minister, the ambassador of the King of Heaven, and John could not bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father.”
― James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

“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.”
― James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

“It was his hatred and his intelligence that he cherished, the one feeding the other.”
― James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

“She sensed that what her aunt spoke of as love was something else—a bribe, a threat, an indecent will to power. She knew that the kind of imprisonment that love might impose was also, mysteriously, a freedom for the soul and spirit, was water in the dry place, and had nothing to do with the prisons, churches, laws, rewards, and punishments, that so positively cluttered the landscape of her aunt’s mind.”
― James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

“I ain't ashamed of it – I'm ashamed of you – you done made me feel a shame I ain't never felt before. I shamed before my God – to let somebody make me cheap, like you done done.”
― James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

“For the first time in her life she hated it all. The white city. The white world. She could not that day think of one decent white person in the whole world. She sat there and she hoped that one day God with tortures inconceivable would grind them utterly into humility and make them know that black boys and black girls whom they treated with such condescension, such distain and such good humor had hearts like human beings too, More human hearts than theirs.”
― James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

“People find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time: Mcdougal Littell Literature Connections

“Whoever debases others is debasing himself.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time