"Would you--be good enough--" Alice panted out, after running a little further, "to stop a minute--just to get--one's breath again...?" "I'm good enough," the King said, "only I'm not strong enough. You see, a minute goes by so fearfully quick. You might as well try to stop a Bandersnatch!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For mainstream American blacks, the vast majority of churches have Hebrew names--Ebenezer, Mount Zion, Canaan, Mount Moriah, Taber...nacle, New Hebron, Mount Olive. Hebraic traditions run deep in the black church. More than any people on earth, including the Jews, American blacks have adopted the Mosaic model of social organization, with the exalted political prophet bonded to the "children of Israel" below. Blacks and Jews have in common a history of cyclical swings between cultural separatism and assimilation. Black Zionists helped establish an independent Liberia in 1847, some fifty years before the emergence of modern Jewish Zionism. Jews, who have canonized no new prophets in two millennia and who shudder at the memory of their false messiahs, look with both longing and horror upon the last generation's procession of black prophets: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Louis Farrakhan, and Jesse Jackson. Depending on one's prediction of the outcome, blacks and Jews are either intimate enemies or quarrelsome cousins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No country is so peaceful as the one that leads into death. Life arches above one's head like a bridgespan, and below it flows the... water, carries the boat, takes it further.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How ignorant we are! How ignorant everyone is! We can cut across only a small area of the appallingly expanding fields of knowledg...e. No human being can know more than a tiny fraction of the whole. It must have been satisfactory in ancient times when one's own land seemed to be the universe; when research studies, pamphlets, books did not issue in endless flow; when laboratories and scientists were not so rapidly pushing back frontiers of knowledge that the process of unlearning the old left you gasping for breath.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no passion more dominant and instinctive in the human spirit than the need of the country to which one belongs.... The ti...me comes when nothing in the world is so important as a breath of one's own particular climate. If it were one's last penny it would be used for that return passage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I saw how all the trembling ages past, Molded to her by deep and deeper breath,... Neared to the hour when Beauty breathes her last And knows herself in death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives, Live registered upon our brazen tombs,... And then grace us in the disgrace of death; When spite of cormorant devouring Time, Th' endeavor of this present breath may buy That honor which shall bate his scythe's keen edge, And make us heirs of all eternity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »