anthologists

"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."

"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."

"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..."

"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."

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

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

"this is the one I love.he is not here but the air is still warm from where he might have been"

"we have spent hours circling each other with words-thinly vowelled embraces"

"how to translate these words into silences or the silences into words"

"when I cannot fix you behind my eyes I carry your absence like stars on the blue roof."

"So far it has worked by imagining you in all the places I would like you to be"

"I don't believe the half I hear, Nor the quarter of what I see! But I have one faith, sublime and true, That nothing can shake or slay; Each spring I firmly believe anew All the seed catalogues say!"

"It is the interest one takes in books that makes a library. And if a library have interest it is; if not, it isn't."

"A cynic is a man who looks at the world with a monocle in his mind's eye."

"Of two evils choose the prettier."

"A guilty conscience is the mother of invention."

"A blunder at the right moment is better than cleverness at the wrong time."

"The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us — oh, they’re the worst of all!"

"I love the Christmas-tide, and yet, I notice this, each year I live; I always like the gifts I get, But how I love the gifts I give!"

"“A noble theme!” the tyro cried; And straightway scribbled off a sonnet. “A noble theme,” the poet sighed; “I am not fit to write upon it.”"

"They borrow books they will not buy, They have no ethics or religions; I wish some kind Burbankian guy Could cross my books with homing pigeons!"

"Advice is one of those things it is far more blessed to give than to receive."

"Youth is a silly, vapid state, Old age with fears and ills is rife; This simple boon I beg of Fate — A thousand years of Middle Life."

"He laughs best who laughs last, The wiseacres vow; But I am impatient, I want to laugh now."

"When they were not working they had children without being able to secure a man they could really call a husband."

"The Black man must enter the white man’s house through the back door. The Black man does most of the dirty work…"

"You’ll come back and be able to look after yourself and the two you’re leaving behind."

"We’d never really known father before. And now living close to him and seeing him at close quarters, I realised that his face was unlikeable."

"The Black man must enter the white man’s house through the back door. The Black man does most of the dirty work… Black man cleans the streets but mustn’t walk freely on the pavement; Black man must build houses for the white man but cannot live in them; Black man cooks the white man’s food but eats what is left over."

"The Buddha, therefore, took for granted the Vedic cosmic geography wherein all these natural and supernatural beings lived. It is no wonder then that the anthology Subhāitaratnakoa of Vidyākara (c. 1100) a Buddhist abbot at the monastery of Jagaddala in present-day Bangladesh, has 20 verses to the Buddha, but 73 to Śiva, and 40 to Visnu."