Joe

“I’ve heard parents express horror at their children listening to crime stories on the radio; yet on Sunday mornings they never hesitate to send them off to Sunday school to hear the most horrific story of all. . . .)”
― Richard Wright, The Man Who Lived Underground

“But if you accuse a man of something that he did not do, his behavior will be utterly unpredictable. It has the power of upsetting his entire way of life, coloring his feelings about people for a lifetime, and sowing the seeds of distrust so deep that they will grow and bear fruit for years afterwards.”
― Richard Wright, The Man Who Lived Underground

“To me—rightly or wrongly—the hallmark of good writing resides precisely in this sense of creating the new, the freedom and the need and the desire to create this new.”
― Richard Wright, The Man Who Lived Underground

“No matter how he appears to us, he’s still a servant of the Law; he belongs to the Law, and thus is beyond human judgment. In that case one can’t see the doorkeeper as subordinate to the man. To be bound by his office, even if only at the entrance to the Law, is incomparably better than to live freely in the world. The man has only just arrived at the Law, the doorkeeper is already there. He has been appointed to his post by the Law, to doubt his dignity is to doubt the Law itself.” “I don’t agree with that opinion,” said K., shaking his head, “for if you accept it, you have to consider everything the doorkeeper says as true. But you’ve already proved conclusively that that’s not possible.” “No,” said the priest, “you don’t have to consider everything true, you just have to consider it necessary.” “A depressing opinion,” said K. “Lies are made into a universal system.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial