Poets From The United States

"Dilsey stroked Ben's lower head, slowly and steadily, smoothing the bang upon his brow. He wailed quietly, unhurriedly. "Hush," Dilsey said. "Hush, now. We be gone in a minute. Hush, now." He wailed quietly and steadily."

"Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets."

"When people act like niggers, no matter who they are, the only thing to do is treat them like a nigger."

"Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say."

"I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it."

"There is no such thing," meditated Bill, "as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damnfool if he doesn't."

"Civilization," mused Bill once, "started with distillation."

"Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find."

"Some folks wouldn't even speak when they passed me on the street. Then MGM came to town to film Intruder in the Dust, and that made some difference because I'd brought money into Oxford [Mississippi]. But it wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand thirty thousand dollars."

"Why that's a hundred miles away. That's a long way to go just to eat."

"There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need."

"Mr. Khrushchev says that Communism, the police state, will bury the free ones. He is a smart gentleman, he knows that this is nonsense since freedom, man's dim concept of and belief in the human spirit is the cause of all his troubles in his own country. But if he means that Communism will bury capitalism, he is correct. That funeral will occur about ten minutes after the police bury gambling. Because simple man, the human race, will bury both of them. That will be when we have expended the last grain, dram, and iota of our natural resources. But man himself will not be in that grave. The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next."

"Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this ... as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth; in one generation all the Napoleons and Hitlers and Caesars and Mussolinis and Stalins and all the other tyrants who want power and aggrandizement, and the simple politicians and time-servers who themselves are merely baffled or ignorant or afraid, who have used, or are using, or hope to use, man’s fear and greed for man’s enslavement, will have vanished from the face of it."

"It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books; I wish I had enough sense to see ahead thirty years ago, and like some of the Elizabethans, not signed them. It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died."

"Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid. Ain't nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be."

"For the holy are susceptible too to evil, even as you and I, signori; they too are helpless before sin without God's aid... and the holy can be fooled by sin as quickly as you or I, signori. Quicker, because they are holy."

"The two Indians crossed the plantation toward the slave quarters. ... "Man was not made to sweat." "That's so. See what it has done to their flesh." "Yes. Black. It has a bitter taste, too." "You have eaten of it?" "Once." ... Doom began to acquire more slaves and to cultivate some of his land, as the white people did. But he never had enough for them to do. In utter idleness the majority of them led lives transplanted whole out of African jungles ... there was a hierarchy of cousins and uncles who ruled the clan and who finally gathered in squatting conclave over the Negro question, squatting profoundly ... "We cannot eat them," one said. "Why not?" "There are too many of them." "That's true," a third said. "Once we started, we should have to eat them all. And that much flesh diet is not good for man." ... "It means work," the third said. "Let the Negroes do it," the first said. ... "Yao. Let the Negroes do it. They appear to like sweating.""

"Whenever a nation is converted to Christianity, its Christianity, in practice, must be largely converted to paganism."

"Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind."

"The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him."

"Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge."

"In Walt Whitman democracy is carried into psychology and morals. The various sights, moods, and emotions are given each one vote; they are declared to be all free and equal, and the innumerable commonplace moments of life are suffered to speak like the others. Those moments formerly reputed great are not excluded, but they are made to march in the ranks with their companions—plain foot-soldiers and servants of the hour."

"To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic."

"Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand."

"No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient and right. ** p. 49"

"Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained."

"To covet truth is a very distinguished passion."

"The Bible is literature, not dogma."

"Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood."

"Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself."

"Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome."

"Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have generally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter. If they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance and affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in could not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature's meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their judgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal."

"When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind...They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph for their country."

"History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were not what science necessarily rest on. In order to sift evidence we must rely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to expand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe."

"Art like life should be free, since both are experimental."

"The mind celebrates a little triumph whenever it can formulate a truth, however unwelcome to the flesh, or discover an actual force, however unfavourable to given interests."

"To know how just a cause we have for grieving is already a consolation."

"Every moment celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor."

"Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit."

"Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion."

"Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them."

"Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them."

"In proportion as a man's interests become humane and his efforts rational, he appropriates and expands a common life, which reappears in all individuals who reach the same impersonal level of ideas."

"When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different."

"What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art."

"Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble, it must remain rare, if common, it must become mean."

"Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate."

"It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation."

"To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love."

"The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice."