Nick just cocked his head suspiciously, asking “Who are you?” and then “What’s VISTA?” and then, incredulously, “You came here to teach us things?”
“Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
― Ragtime
― Ragtime
“What it comes to is that if we - who can scarcely be considered a white nation - persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay. Whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements and transform them. The price of this transformation the unconditional freedom of the Negro. It is not too much to say that he - who has been so long rejected - must now be embraced and at no matter what psychic or social risk. He is the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as his.”
―
―
“The literary experience extends impression into discourse. It flowers to thought with nouns, verbs, objects. It thinks. Film implodes discourse, it deliterates thought, it shrinks it to the compacted meaning of the preverbal impression or intuition or understanding. You receive what you see, you don't have to think it out. . . . Fiction goes everywhere, inside, outside, it stops, it goes, its action can be mental. Nor is it time-driven. Film is time-driven, it never ruminates, it shows the outside of life, it shows behavior. It tends to the simplest moral reasoning. Films out of Hollywood are linear. The narrative simplification of complex morally consequential reality is always the drift of a film inspired by a book. Novels can do anything in the dark horrors of consciousness. Films do close-ups, car drive-ups, places, chases and explosions.”
―
―
“But in another city, another valley, another ghetto, another slum, another favela, another township, another intifada, another war, another birth, somebody is singing Redemption Song, as if the Singer wrote it for no other reason but for this sufferah to sing, shout, whisper, weep, bawl, and scream right here, right now.”
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
― A Brief History of Seven Killings
SMART
— 32 members
— last activity Jun 30, 2017 06:03PM
Book club for members of closed FB group https://www.facebook.com/groups/smartly/?hc_ref=NEWSFEED currently called Social Media Approaches for Respect ...more
Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge
— 26874 members
— last activity Jan 29, 2026 05:32PM
An annual reading challenge to to help you stretch your reading limits and explore new voices, worlds, and genres! The challenge begins in January, bu ...more
Kate’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Kate’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Kate
Lists liked by Kate
























