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“Imaginary Africa was a cornucopia of imponderables that like the monstrous Grendel in Beowulf resisted explanation. Thus, a plethora of incompatible metaphors can be gleaned from the literature. As the original locus of the human race, Africa is ancient, yet, being under colonial control, it is also infantile. A kind of old fetus always waiting to be born but confounding all midwives. In novel after novel, short story after short story, Africa is simultaneously innocent and corrupting, savage and pure, irrational and wise.”
― The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
― The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
“There was one circumstance that tormented me at that time, namely that nobody else was like me and I wasn't like anybody else. 'I am one person, and they are everybody,' I would think, falling into a brown study. It is evident from this that I was still only a boy.”
― Notes from Underground & The Double
― Notes from Underground & The Double
“Thou didst not come down from the cross when they shouted to Thee, mocking and reviling Thee, "Come down from the cross and we will believe that Thou art He." Thou didst not come down, for again Thou wouldst not enslave man by a miracle. Thou didst crave faith given freely, not based on a miracle. Thou didst crave for free love and not the base raptures of the slave before the might that has overawed him for ever.”
― The Grand Inquisitor
― The Grand Inquisitor
“The spectacle of mass movement draws attention inevitably to the borders, the porous places, the vulnerable points where one's concept of home is seen as being menaced by foreigners. Much of the alarm hovering at the borders, the gates, is stoked, it seems to me, by (1) both the threat and the promise of globalism and (2) an uneasy relationship with our own foreignness, our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging.”
― The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
― The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
“And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own: for instance "I can't possibly teach Black women's writing- their experience is so different from mine," yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another: "She's a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?" Or, "she's a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?" Or again, "This woman writes of her sons and I have no children." And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.”
― The Cancer Journals
― The Cancer Journals
ronnie’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at ronnie’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
Favorite Genres
Art, Biography, Chick-lit, Children's, Christian, Classics, Comics, Fantasy, Fiction, Gay and Lesbian, Graphic novels, Historical fiction, History, Horror, Humor and Comedy, Manga, Memoir, Non-fiction, Paranormal, Philosophy, Poetry, Psychology, Religion, Romance, Science, Science fiction, Suspense, Spirituality, and Young-adult
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