It was the world of Southern, rural, black growing up, of folks sitting on porches day and night, of folks calling your mama, 'cau...se you walked by and didn't speak, and of the switch waiting when you got home so that you could be taught some manners. It was a world of single black older women schoolteachers, dedicated, tough; they had taught your mama, her sisters, and her friends. They knew your people in ways that you never would and shared their insight, keeping us in touch with generations. It was a world where we had a history.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing, All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,... Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green, And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself, But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for I knew I could not,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Admiration is a very short-lived passion that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object, unless it be still fed wit...h fresh discoveries, and kept alive by a new perpetual succession of miracles rising up to its view.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a strange fact about the human mind, a fact that differentiates the mind sharply from the body. The body is limited in wa...ys that the mind is not. One sign of this is that the body does not continue indefinitely to grow in strength and develop in skill and grace. By the time most people are thirty years old, their bodies are as good as they will ever be; in fact, many persons' bodies have begun to deteriorate by that time. But there is no limit to the amount of growth and development that the mind can sustain. The mind does not stop growing at any particular age.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Stupid or smart, there wasn't much choice about what was going to happen to me ... Growing up was like falling into a hole.... I m...ight not quit school, not while Mama had any say in the matter, but what difference would that make? What was I going to do in five years? Work in the textile mill? Join Mama at the diner? It all looked bleak to me. No wonder people got crazy as they grew up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means, in this country, the need to be left. I am driven into grudging ...toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... even I am growing accustomed to slavery; so much so that I cease to think of its accursed influence and calmly eat from the ha...nds of the bondman without being mindful that he is such. O, Slavery, hateful thing that thou art thus to blunt the keen edge of conscience!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »