Pulitzer Prize Winners

"The statistics are meagre, and so we have no way of knowing the number of non-Jews who were murdered in the gas chambers prior to this cut-off date [i.e. 4 April 1943]; not many, compared to the Jews, but certainly they numbered in the tens of thousands. Yet to escape the crematoriums was, of course, to gain only the most feeble hold on the possibility of survival. Statistics regarding the non-Jews who perished during the four years of the existence of Auschwitz as a result of starvation and disease are likewise inexact but somewhat more reliable. It would appear that out of the four million who died, perhaps three quarters of a million - or approximately a fifth of the total - fell into the category which the Nazis termed Aryan. This was at Auschwitz alone."

"The Consumers Union Report on Smoking was an aid to my stopping a two-pack-a-day habit which commenced in early infancy. For myself, after two or three days of great flaccidity of spirit, an aimless oral yearning, aching moments of hunger at the pit of the stomach, and an awful intermittent urge to burst into tears, the problem resolved itself, and in less than a week all craving vanished. Curiously, for the first time in my life, I developed a racking cough, but this, too, disappeared. A sense of smugness, a kind of fatness of soul, is the reward for such a struggle."

"Numberless factors shape one's needs and longings."

"Neither the Protestant church nor Anglo-American law was equipped to cope with the staggering problem of the status of the Negro: forced to choose between regarding him as a moral human being and as property, they chose the definition of property. The result was the utter degradation of a people. It was an oppression unparalled in human history. This is the problem we are faced with today: too many white Americans still deny the Negro his position as a moral human being."

"Even today, many otherwise well-informed people have never heard the name Nat Turner."

"’Neath cold sand I dreamed of death / but woke at dawn to see / in glory, the bright, the morning star. This was not judgement day — only morning. Morning: excellent and fair."

"Let your love flow out on all living things. These words at some level have the quality of a strapping homily. Nonetheless, they are remarkably beautiful, strung together in their honest lump-like English syllables... Let your love flow out on all living things. But there are a couple of problems with this precept of mine. The first is, of course, that it is not mine. It springs from the universe and is the property of God, and the words have been intercepted — on the wing, so to speak — by such mediators as Lao-tzu, Jesus, Gautama Buddha and thousands upon thousands of lesser prophets, including your narrator, who heard the terrible truth of their drumming somewhere between Baltimore and Wilmington and set them down with the fury of a madman sculpting in stone."

"The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response. The query: “At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?” And the answer: “Where was man?”"

"Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz."

"Her thought process dwindled, ceased. Then she felt her legs crumple. "I can't choose! I can't choose!""

"I would have done it all again. I would have destroyed them all. Yet I would have spared one. I would have spared her that showed me Him whose presence I had not fathomed or maybe never even known. Great God, how early it is! Until now I had almost forgotten His name. “Come!” the voice booms, but commanding me now: Come, My son! I turn in surrender. Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. Oh how bright and fair the morning star …"

"I raise my eyes upward. There alone amidst the blue, steadfast, unmoving, fiery marvel of brightness, shines the morning star. Never has that star seemed so radiant, and I stand gazing at it and do not move though the chill of the damp floor imprisons my feet in piercing icebound pain. Surely I come quickly …"

"I shivered in the knowledge of the futility of all ambition. My mouth was sour with the yellow recollection of death and blood-smeared fields and walls. I watched the girl slip away, vanish without a hand laid upon her. Who knows but whether we were not doomed to lose. I know nothing any longer. Nothing. Did I really wish to vouchsafe a life for the one that I had taken?"

"“Surely mankind has yet to be born. Surely this is true! For only something blind and uncomprehending could exist in such a mean conjunction with its own flesh, its own kind. How else account for such faltering, clumsy, hateful cruelty? Even the possums and the skunks know better! Even the weasels and the meadow mice have a natural regard for their own blood and kin. Only the insects are low enough to do the low things that people do — like those ants that swarm on poplars in the summertime, greedily husbanding little green aphids for the honeydew they secrete. Yes, it could be that mankind has yet to be born. Ah, what bitter tears God must weep at the sight of the things that men do to other men!” He broke off then and I saw him shake his head convulsively, his voice a sudden cry: “In the name of money! Money! ”"

"Grieving, yet somehow unbending, steadfast, unafraid, the voice rose through the evening like memory, and a gust of wind blew up from the river, dimming the song, rustling the trees, then died and became still. I’ll lay in de grave and stretch out my arms … Suddenly the voice ceased, and all was quiet. Then what I done was wrong, Lord? I said. And if what I done was wrong, is there no redemption? I raised my eyes upward but there was no answer, only the gray impermeable sky and night falling fast over Jerusalem."

"RIDING DOWN TO Port Warwick from Richmond, the train begins to pick up speed on the outskirts of the city, past the tobacco factories with their ever-present haze of acrid, sweetish dust and past the rows of uniformly brown clapboard houses which stretch down the hilly streets for miles, it seems, the hundreds of rooftops all reflecting the pale light of dawn; past the suburban roads still sluggish and sleepy with early morning traffic, and rattling swiftly now over the bridge which separates the last two hills where in the valley below you can see the James River winding beneath its acid-green crust of scum out beside the chemical plants and more rows of clapboard houses and into the woods beyond."

"My life and work have been far from free of blemish, and so I think it would be unpardonable for a biographer not to dish up the dirt."

"It could be all unwittingly that I wrote in Darkness Visible what amounted to a Rosetta stone for my other work."

"When, in the autumn of 1947, I was fired from the first and only job I have ever held, I wanted one thing out of life: to become a writer. I left my position as manuscript reader at the McGraw-Hill Book Company with no regrets; the job had been onerous and boring. It did not occur to me that there would be many difficulties to impede my ambition; in fact, the job itself had been an impediment. All I knew was that I burned to write a novel and I could not have cared less that my bank account was close to zero, with no replenishment in sight. At the age of twenty-two I had such pure hopes in my ability to write not just a respectable first novel, but a novel that would be completely out of the ordinary, that when I left the McGraw-Hill Building for the last time I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire."

"I discovered that I had, in the past two decades, written a far greater amount in the essay form than I remembered. Certainly I have written enough of it to demonstrate that I harbor no disdain for literary journalism or just plain journalism, under whose sponsorship I have been able to express much that has fascinated me, or alarmed me, or amused me, or otherwise engaged my attention when I was not writing a book."

"The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads."

"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it."

"Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word — life. Certainly this might be an age of so-called faithlessness and despair we live in, but the new writers haven’t cornered any market on faithlessness and despair, any more than Dostoyevsky or Marlowe or Sophocles did. Every age has its terrible aches and pains, its peculiar new horrors, and every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what that same friend of mine calls “the fleas of life”—you know, colds, hangovers, bills, sprained ankles, and little nuisances of one sort or another. They are the constants of life, at the core of life, along with nice little delights that come along every now and then."

"I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker."

"When I read Jefferson's disparagement of Wheatley, it felt like he had been disparaging the entire lineage of Black poets who would follow her, myself included, and I saw a man who had not had a clear understanding of what love is...When Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about the children on the South Side of Chicago playing with one another in neighborhoods left neglected by the city, it was an act of love..."

"(At National Black Theater performance) I was in awe of the words I witnessed that day. It was the first time that I heard the works of writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka. I heard poetry that was about me, that was very immediate. I connected to it in a visceral way. That experience moved me so profoundly that I went home and that night I wrote my first batch of poems. It was like the floodgates opened. That reading empowered me with a voice and gave me permission to express everything that had been festering in me for years. So I just started experimenting with language and writing all kinds of things."

"I did not read any Langston Hughes until I was an adult, but I remember being carried away by him and Gwendolyn Brooks."

"A black woman would have tremendous difficulties, like a black man, to go to the nitty gritty, to express what is really going on inside. Because what happens is that you are being treacherous. By telling the truth about myself I am telling the truth about my father, my mother and a whole lot of other people, too. You can get crucified for that…it's one of the things that happen when you live in a sick society. And some black women like Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall have gotten beyond that at whatever price, but they got beyond it."

"Until the publication of Brooks's Maud Martha, only Zora Neale Hurston had populated her fiction and folklore with ordinary people. Hurston's works, however, were southern and rural, and although they have been vastly important in the development of a literary self-portraiture of Afro-American women, it was Brooks's novel (and poetry) that launched a genre embedded in northern, urban, ghetto experience which encouraged the subsequent works of Paule Marshall, Ann Petry, and Alice Childress, among many others...For many Brooks's works in general, and Maud Martha in particular, were a touchstone, inscribing Black womanhood, as Paule Marshall once observed, "in all the wonder of her complexity." Maud Martha, published in 1953, presaged the literary outpouring by Black women since the early 1960s...The pioneering achievement of Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha was that it offered a mirror, inviting Black women to look at themselves and their urban, working-class community through the eyes of one of their own. In its emphasis on relationship, in its attention to community, in its relentless probing of the consequences of racism, in its conjuring of the intimate through interior dialogue and the interior space of Maud Martha's home, Brooks's novel expressed precisely both a female sensibility and the wisdom and insight drawn from everyday life."

"Our earth is round, and, among other things That means that you and I can hold completely different Points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show Stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, While mine, at the same moment, Spreads beautiful to darkness."

"That time we all heard it, cool and clear, cutting across the hot grit of the day. The major Voice. The adult Voice forgoing Rolling River, forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge and other symptoms of an old despond. Warning, in music-words devout and large, that we are each other's harvest: we are each other's business: we are each other's magnitude and bond."

"Somebody muffed it?? Somebody wanted to joke."

"Come: there shall be such islanding from grief, And small communion with the master shore. Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin, Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry In humming pallor or to leap and die."

"It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes I am aware there is winter to heed. There is no warm house That is fitted with my need."

"It is a real chill out, The genuine thing. I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer Because sun stays and birds continue to sing."

"Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love. My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls, Are gone from the house. My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite And night is night."

"Coherent Counsel! Good man. Require of us our terribly excluded blue. Constrain, repair a ripped, revolted land. Put hand in hand land over. Reprove the abler droughts and manias of the day and a felicity entreat. Love. Complete your pledges, reinforce your aides, renew stance, testament."

"The good man. He is still enhancer, renouncer. In the time of detachment, in the time of the vivid heather and affectionate evil, in the time of oral grave grave legalities of hate - all real walks our prime registered reproach and seal. Our successful moral. The good man."

"Small Mabel whimpered all night long, For calling herself the cause. Her oak-eyed mother did no thing But change the bloody gauze."

"He ran like a mad thing into the night And the words in his mouth were stinking. By the time he had hurt his first white man He was no longer thinking. By the time he had hurt his fourth white man Rudolph Reed was dead. His neighbors gathered and kicked his corpse. "Nigger—" his neighbors said."

"The first night, a rock, big as two fists. The second, a rock big as three. But nary a curse cursed Rudolph Reed. (Though oaken as man could be.) The third night, a silvery ring of glass. Patience arched to endure, But he looked, and lo! small Mabel's blood Was staining her gaze so pure."

"Nary a grin grinned Rudolph Reed, Nary a curse cursed he, But moved in his House. With his dark little wife, And his dark little children three."

"Rudolph Reed was oaken. His wife was oaken too. And his two good girls and his good little man Oakened as they grew."

"My Poem is life, and not finished. It shall never be finished. My Poem is life, and can grow. Wherever life can grow, it will. It will sprout out, and do the best it can. I give you what I have. You don’t get all your questions answered in this world. How many answers shall be found in the developing world of my Poem? I don’t know. Nevertheless I put my Poem, which is my life, into your hands, where it will do the best it can."

"I pass you my Poem! — to tell you we are all vulnerable — the midget, the Mighty, the richest, the poor. Men, women, children, and trees. I am vulnerable."

"I pass you my Poem. A poem doesn’t do everything for you. You are supposed to go on with your thinking. You are supposed to enrich the other person’s poem with your extensions, your uniquely personal understandings, thus making the poem serve you."

"Art hurts. Art urges voyages— and it is easier to stay at home."

"We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon."

"Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come Again in this identical guise."

"It is brave to be involved To be not fearful to be unresolved."