All Quotes

"The King, with whom I had this Discourse, was so affected with the Truth of it, that, You are in the right, said he to me; and ’tis with very great Justice that one of our Poets has elegantly compar’d all kind of Men to the Pieces, wherewith we play at Chess: Some act the Kings, the Queens, the Knights, the Fools, and simple Pawns. There is a vast Difference between them, while they are in Motion; but when once the Game is over, and the Chess-board shut, they are thrown promiscuously together into the same Box, without any manner of Distinction. Death does the very same thing: Kings, Emperors, Merchants, Slaves, Warriors, Men of the Robe, and of the Revenue, all then become equal; and there is nothing but our good Deeds and Charity towards our Neighbours, that will give us one Day a Superiority above others."

"The industry of Gervase was greater than his insight. He took a narrow and monastic view of current politics; he was seldom in touch with the leading statesmen of his day."

"Gervase is not one of the great historians of his age, but he illustrates with fidelity the tone and temper of his monastic world. Much of what he writes has the value of contemporary knowledge and observation, or at least of personal recollection; and much bears the impress of recording the local tradition of the writer's religious house. Even that which is not original has at least the value of a contemporary or nearly contemporary corroboration of the statements which it repeats."

"Though his services were peculiarly valuable n his early fields of labour as he had mastered both the Montagnais and the English languages, yet an able man being needed to organize parish and mission work among the French Canadians at Lowell, Father Garin was ordered thither and in a short time his remarkable good sense, courteous manner, and kindly disposition won for him a wonderful influence over his people."

"The theorist should not let us forget the poet."

"No longer is it a matter of the narrow roads where traditional beauty is offered in its clarity and obviousness to the admiration of the crowds. The crowds were taught the victory of intelligence over the world and the submission of the forces of nature to man. Now it is a question of seizing and admiring a new art which leaves humankind in its true condition, fragile and dependent, and which nevertheless, in the very spectacle of things ignored or silenced, opens unsuspected possibilities to the artist. And this is the domain of the strange, the Marvelous, and the fantastic, a domain scorned by people of certain inclinations. Here is the freed image, dazzling and beautiful, with a beauty that could not be more unexpected and overwhelming. Here are the poet, the painter, and the artist, presiding over the metamorphoses and the inversions of the world under the sign of hallucination and madness....Here at last the world of nature and things makes direct contact with the human being who is again in the fullest sense spontaneous and natural. Here at last is the true communion and the true knowledge, chance mastered and recognized, the mystery now a friend and helpful."

"Our problem now is to determine whether the Ethiopian attitude that we discovered was the very essence of our whole way of living can be the point of departure for a viable cultural style, however grandiose this may seem. It is exalting to imagine on these tropical islands, restored finally to their inner truth, a lasting and fertile harmony between humankind and the earth--under the sign of the plant. We are at last called on to know who we are. Splendors and hopes await us. Surrealism has restored to us some of our chances. Now it is up to us to find others. In its light. Understand me well: It is not at all a question of going back, to resurrect an African past which we have learned to know and respect. It is rather a question of mobilizing all the mingled living forces on this soil where race is the result of an endless mixing, of becoming conscious of the formidable mass of diverse energies that we have heretofore locked up within ourselves. We must now put them to use in all their fullness, unswervingly, and without falsification. So much for those who think we are mere dreamers! The most troubling reality is ours. We shall act. This land of ours can only become what we want it to be."

"Surrealism lives! And it is young, ardent, and revolutionary. In 1943 surrealism surely remains, as always, an activity whose aim is to explore and express systematically--and thus, neutralize--the forbidden zones of the human mind, an activity which desperately tries to give humankind the means of reducing the old antinomies, those "true alembics of suffering," and the only force enabling us to recover "this unique, original faculty, traces of which are retained by the primitive and the child, and which lifts the curse of the insurmountable barrier between inner and outer worlds." But surrealism, further proving its vitality, has evolved-or, rather, blossomed. When Breton created surrealism, the most urgent task was to free the mind from the shackles of absurd logic and of so-called reason. But in 1943, when freedom herself is threatened throughout the world, surrealism, which has never for one instant ceased to remain in the service of the largest and most thoroughgoing human emancipation, can now be summed up completely in one single, magic word: freedom."

"...this volume will occupy a vaunted place alongside the writings of C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Sylvia Wynter, Édouard Glissant, George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, Stuart Hall, and Walter Rodney"

"Such is surrealist activity, a total activity: the only one capable of liberating humankind by revealing the unconscious, an activity that will help free the peoples of the world as it illuminates the blind myths that have led them up till now...far from contradicting, diluting, or diverting our revolutionary attitude toward life, surrealism strengthens it. It nourishes an impatient strength within us, endlessly reinforcing the massive army of refusals. And I am also thinking of tomorrow. Millions of black hands will hoist their terror across the furious skies of world war. Freed from a long benumbing slumber, the most disinherited of all peoples will rise up from plains of ashes. Our surrealism will supply this rising people with a punch from its very depths. Our surrealism will enable us to finally transcend the sordid antinomies of the present: whites/Blacks, Europeans/Africans, civilized/savages-at last rediscovering the magic power of the mahoulis, drawn directly from living sources. Colonial idiocy will be purified in the welder's blue flame. We shall recover our value as metal, our cutting edge of steel, our unprecedented communions... Surrealism, tightrope of our hope."

"No important figure in the history of surrealism has been so overshadowed by a spouse as Suzanne Césaire, wife of poet/playwright Aimé Césaire. In view of her undeniably crucial role in the development of surrealism as well as of Négritude, it is astonishing how rarely she is mentioned in the voluminous critical literature on these movements."

"surrealists had questioned technology, "progress," and the dominant Euro-American attitude toward nature long before 1940. However, it was this young Black woman, Suzanne Césaire, and her surrealist friends on a tiny island in the Caribbean during a time of imperialist world war who, more than anyone else, made these issues paramount concerns of surrealists everywhere. In Tropiques the need for radical change in the relations between humankind and nature was presented with special urgency, as an inseparable component of poetic activity and revolutionary struggle. Interestingly, the first appearance of the word ecology in a surrealist publication turns up in this journal."

"The whole film, my character has been covering up her emotions with a hardness, not letting anybody see her crack, so I found myself also feeling like that during filming. I was never emotional, and me as Mikey, I’m a very emotional person. For the last scene, I was almost shaking going into the car because I didn’t know what that would feel like—because I had been feeling the same way as my character for so long."

"I grew up in Los Angeles, but Hollywood always felt so far away from me. So to be here standing in this room today is really incredible. I also just want to again recognize and honor the sex worker community. I will continue to support and be an ally. I also just want to recognize the thoughtful, intelligent, beautiful, breathtaking work of my fellow nominees. I’m honored to be recognized alongside all of you. This is a dream come true."

"Any uncomfortability or pain or difficulty I felt is temporary because that’s just how it is. I welcome those feelings because it means it’s something real that I’m able to show. The film will be forever —any sadness or pain I feel is temporary, and it goes away. And I’m lucky. This is my dream job."

"For us, here, a key aspect of anti-austerity organizing we would need to take back up is the search for an alternative economic vision with people and nature at its center; and by putting people at the center I mean at the center of decision-making about economic development."

"I'm always being accused of not feeling strongly enough about the location of the Black person. I don't know why you can't feel more than one thing at the same time, or why you can't see out of both your eyes. I perfectly well feel the location of the Black person. That doesn't stop me from seeing other people's location."

"My strongest memory of both Ratoon and New World is the excitement of being part of a world of ideas, because, after all, my other world is one that has increasingly moved far away from the ferment and enthusiasm of the fifties to something that behaves as if there's no way out."

"One of the things that strikes me about now is that if you talk to Indo-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese they can tell you the same story as two stories; and it's now crystallized even into what (television] stations we look at. Afro-Guyanese get their news from some stations, and Indo-Guyanese get their news from others. That first started for me in the 1960s: these two different stories from these two people living in the same place."

"if you want to talk about “empowering” any group of people, it is because you believe or know that something is taking power away from that group...For me, then, the first question is, what are the factors that stop young people in Guyana today from developing or using their power."

"I hated a lot of things about the Guyana in which I grew up, so I am not romanticising when I say that in spite of all that was wrong with it, it was as a child in that Guyana that I learned you could change your place. And one important reason was, that I grew up when men and women whom you came to know only as belonging to this party or that party, or this race or that race, joined together when they themselves were still young people in their twenties, to show that “ordinary” people could transform their world. That we didn’t have to be a colony. That people, poor and some not poor, women and men, from the races that were despised, could organise together and refuse to stay in their place."

"Sometime soon, some of you have to try walk across the divisions between you and join yourselves together to become the power you can be. Only then, whichever party or other group you belong to, can you work out your demands (not your requests) as young people, work out how you will make them happen, and make them happen."

"Andaiye was the most important Caribbean woman intellectual-activist of the generation of Walter Rodney. Her subtle, loving and angry intelligence is rescued here, and with it the memory of the political struggles of the 1970s and 80s in which a critical feminism emerged from the ruins of the Black Power moment"

"He slept with his fathers."

"in Andaiye’s departure we mourn Guyana’s conscience...Part of what Andaiye has done over the years is to point these political giants to a human and humane mode of conflict resolution, which has always been in their power and even at this stage lies in their power...In the tributes paid to Andaiye in the Guyana media were many regrets that she had not been suitably, or at all, recognised or honoured by governments. What has hurt the country is not the failure of governments serially to accord some spectacular honour to this wiry gift of the ancestors to our age. It is their failure as one commentator expressed it to attempt, to adopt her praxis. She not only stood forever with those of all races threatened with marginalisation. She set examples of a healthy and sincere respect for the Other of the spirit that can achieve the necessary reconciliation and of respect for difference and of cooperation across differences. She achieved the status of a global mentor of her time. May perpetual recognition attend her memory."

"Mary is called Mother. And when is Mary not a mother? "The gathering together of the waters he called seas (maria)" (Gen. 1:10). Was it not she who conceived in her single womb the people going out from Egypt, that it might come forth a heavenly progeny reborn to a new creation, according to the words of the Apostle: "Our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea. And all in Moses were baptised, in the cloud, and in the sea" (Exod. 15:20-21)? That Mary might always leaad the way in man's salvation, in her own right, she went with a canticle before that same people, whom the generating waters had brought forth to light...This is a name [Mary] that is kin to prophecy, salutary to the reborn, the hallmark of virginity, the adornment of modesty, the sign of chastity, a sacrifice to God, the virtue of hospitality, fellowship in holiness. With reason, then, is this maternal name that of Christ's Mother. We have said why the Mother is a bride, why Joseph is a spouse, why Mary has the maternal name, to show that everything about the birth of Christ has a mystical significance."

"God the Father arranged the nuptials for God His Son, when in the womb of the Virgin, He united Him to human nature, when He willed that He who was God before all the ages should at the end of the ages become Man. However, a nuptial union is usually formed by two persons...but we shun as utterly impious the belief that He is composed of two persons. Therefore, with greater freedom and assurance, we may say that these are the nuptials that the Father arranged for His royal Son: through the mystery of the Incarnation. He united the holy Church to Him. Now the bridal chamber of this Bridgeroom was the womb of the Virgin Mother. That is why the Psalmist says: "He hath set his tabernacle in the sun: and he, as a bridgeroom coming out of his bridal chamber" (Ps. 18:6). And it was a bridgeroom in fact that he came forth from His bridal chamber, because to unite the Church to Himself the Incarnate God went forth from the inviolate womb of the Virgin."

"[T]he conciliar debate on Marian devotion influenced the postconcilar debate on celibacy. Devoid of all connotations of sexuality, Mary had long served a twofold purpose in maintaining the discipline of celibacy. First, she provided a justification for a celibate priesthood. The medieval monk Petrus Damiani argued that because Jesus was born of a virgin, he could be touched only by virgin hands, thereby establishing a connection between sexual purity and the Eucharist celebration. Second, she served as a chaste role model and mother figure for priests. Mary, Pius XII wrote, provided the priest solace in his daily struggles against the temptations of the flesh: “When you meet very serious difficulties in the path of holiness and the exercise of your ministry, turn your eyes and your mind trustfully to she who is the Mother of the Eternal Priest and therefore the loving Mother of all Catholic priests.” Many bishops and theologians wanted the council to expand Marian doctrinal some supported conferring on Mary a new title, “Mother of the Church.” However, not all council fathers shared this view. Some preferred that piety be more centered on the Bible and the liturgy and less on devotional practices, including Marian worship. They felt that Marian devotion often diverged from the message found in scripture and in the liturgy. They also feared that any elaboration of Marian devotion would undermine the ecumenical movement. Thus, the seemingly innocent question of where to locate a statement on Mary had far-reaching theological and political ramifications. On August 29, by a margin of only forty votes, the council fathers decided in favor of incorporating a statement on Marian piety into ‘’Lumen Gentium’’. Although Paul VI later preempted the decision of the council fathers and bestowed upon Mary the title they had denied her, “Mother of the Church,” the popularity of Marian devotion continued to decline in Western-Europe."

"(About the Attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II) Interviewer: Was he really convinced that he had been saved by Our Lady? Cardinal Re: Of course. The Governorate of the Vatican posed the question of how to commemorate in St. Peter's Square that dramatic event that took place there. The Pope's answer was immediate: an image of Our Lady was to be placed in memory of the attack. He was convinced that the Blessed Virgin Mary had been present on 13 May to guide the bullet, so that the Pope would survive. Thus, since 8 December 1981, anyone arriving at St. Peter's Square has seen a mosaic of Our Lady holding the Child Jesus in her arms, and at her feet the title Mater Ecclesiae and the coat of arms of John Paul II, with the motto Totus tuus, dominating from a ledge of the Apostolic Palace."

"The architecture of our future is not only unfinished; the scaffolding has hardly gone up."

"The West Indian's education was imported in much the same way that flour and butter are imported from Canada. Since the cultural negotiation was strictly between England and the natives, and England had acquired, somehow, the divine right to organise the native's reading, it is to be expected that England's export of literature would be English. Deliberately and exclusively English. And the further back in time England went for these treasures, the safer was the English commodity. So the examinations, which would determine that Trinidadian's future in the Civil Service, imposed Shakespeare and Wordsworth, and Jane Austen and George Eliot and the whole tabernacle of dead names, now come alive at the world's greatest summit of literary expression."

"Rain, rain, rain . . . my mother put her head through the window to let the neighbour know that I was nine, and they flattered me with the consolation that my birthday had brought showers of blessing. The morning laden with cloud soon passed into noon, and the noon neutral and silent into the sodden grimness of an evening that waded through water. That evening I kept an eye on the crevices of our wasted roof where the colour of the shingles had turned to mourning black, and waited for the weather to rehearse my wishes. But the evening settled on the slush of the roads that dissolved in parts into pools of clay, and I wept for the watery waste of my ninth important day. Yet I was wrong, my mother protested: it was irreverent to disapprove the will of the Lord or reject the consolation that my birthday had brought showers of blessing. It was my ninth celebration of the gift of life, my ninth celebration of the consistent lack of an occasion for celebration..."

"George Lamming is one of the most important writers in the African diaspora, and one whose work has touched illuminatingly on significant aspects of colonialism, postcolonialism, and other matters vitally important to our comprehension of the worlds in which we live."

"in 1953, George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin appeared and everything was transformed. Here breathing to me from every pore of line and page, was the Barbados I have lived. The words, the rhythms, the cadences, the scenes, the people, their predicament. They all came back. They all were possible. And all the more beautiful for having been published and praised by London, mother of metropolises."

"the most powerful and far-ranging of the West Indian school, George Lamming"

"One feels not so much alone when, from a distant witness, supporting evidence comes to buttress one's own testimony. And the voice I now bid you hear is sounding in Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin."

"Among other Indian curiosities, which Callisthenes transmitted to his uncle, was a technical system of logic, which the Brahmins had communicated to the inquisitive Greek."

"Our story begins to commence many years ago in the remote part of the Slobovian Mountains, in the quaint little village of Schmatinof. Near the edge of this village stands the home of Boris Borscht, the bagel baron. But we are not concerned with Boris Borscht, no. Our story concerns another occupant of the Borscht Abode."

"(About Hermann Hesse) Like few others has summarized in his work the impulses and escapism of our time: loved a few years ago by the right, he is not disliked by the left and is appreciated by those who devote themselves to spiritual research. In him, Ladislao Mittner noted, pietism and Buddhism coexisted; in his pages, we find a religion born of a similar union, capable of reflecting trends without offending them."

"If Nietzsche had returned to the beginnings of Greece to reconstruct the hierarchy of values, Hesse was an anti-authoritarian who appealed to institutions; if Spengler had diagnosed the agony of our civilization, he discovered Asia. The canton of Ticino was his true homeland. There he found what he was looking for. There he is buried."

"The theme of silence can be topical or outdated. It is never out of fashion. And today, despite what many may think at first glance, it is undoubtedly topical. Perhaps more so than ever before. “As the power of language diminishes,” noted Susan Sontag, “the power of silence increases.” And ours are times in which language is seen as something corrupt. “In no century,” wrote Ignazio Silone in ‘'Pane e vino’' [the title is ‘'Vino e pane’'], "has the word been so perverted, as it is now, from its natural purpose, which is to enable people to communicate. Speaking and deceiving (often deceiving oneself) are now almost synonymous." The widespread disaffection with words stems from the realization that our speech and that of others has become mostly mere palatal facts, impersonal and banal chatter. (pp. 83-84)"

"Silence also enhances testimony. Silence does not prove, argue, or demonstrate; it only testifies. Yet, despite this, or perhaps because of it, it possesses an unusual power. “Why are you crying out so loudly?” God said to Moses. Yet Moses was silent. “So much,” commented Kierkegaard, “can silence cry out to heaven.” (p. 93)"

"The oxymoron is preferred by the mystic because it allows him to express something ineffable, because it is the best tool for speaking of the unspeakable, because in the world of duality it creates the ‘'coincidentia oppositorum’', which Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), in the context of his theology of the Incarnate Word, considered almost the least imperfect definition of God. The mystic, in his talk of God, punctuated by ‘'improprietas’', ‘'voces obscurae, horridae, inauditae’', seeks through a paroxysmal accumulation of oxymorons to linguistically touch the divine. (from ‘'La mistica e i mistici’', p. 187)"

"Ehh. It’s a living!"

"It's about time for me to employ a little stra-gedy! [rips the mask to make the Crusher think he split his shorts]"

"Now king David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat.Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin: and let her stand before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat.So they sought for a fair damsel throughout all the coasts of Israel, and found Abishag a Shunammite, and brought her to the king.And the damsel was very fair, and cherished the king, and ministered to him: but the king knew her not."

"Then will I cut off Israel out of the land which I have given them; and this house, which I have hallowed for my name, will I cast out of my sight; and Israel shall be a proverb and a byword among all people."

"And when the queen of Sheba had seen all Solomon’s wisdom, and the house that he had built,And the meat of his table, and the sitting of his servants, and the attendance of his ministers, and their apparel, and his cupbearers, and his ascent by which he went up unto the house of the ; there was no more spirit in her."

"Behold, the half was not told me."

"Once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks."