What gave peculiar sanctity to numbers? Why were a million people, who all resembled each other, any way more interesting than one... person? What aspiration could she help to put into the mind of this great million-armed monster that would make it worth her love or respect? Religion? A thousand powerful churches were doing their best, and she could see no chance for a new faith of which she was to be the inspired prophet. Ambition? High popular ideals? Passion for whatever is lofty and pure? The very words irritated her.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had been curiously depressed all day. In the night I wakened. First precise thought: I know why I'm depressed--nothing inspired ...is going on. Second: I demand that life be inspired every moment. Third: the only way to guarantee this is to have inspired conversation every moment. Fourth: most people never get so far as conversation; they haven't the stamina, and there is no time. Fifth: if I had a magazine I could spend my time filling it up with the best conversation the world has to offer. Sixth: marvelous idea--salvation. Seventh: decision to do it. Deep sleep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have never been able to accept the two great laws of humanity--that you're always being suppressed if you're inspired and always... being pushed into the corner if you're exceptional. I won't be cornered and I won't stay suppressed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product rema...ins closest to the thought that inspired it.... Of all things of thought, poetry is the closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The absolute dependence of a newborn infant inspired many things in me, but it did not activate any magical knowledge about what t...o do for the next twenty years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... we have the satisfaction of knowing that because all of us believed, we inspired, motivated, and liberated some of the most be...autiful people on earth--young, gifted, and black.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which l...ife will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What an antithetical mind!--tenderness, roughness--delicacy, coarseness--sentiment, sensuality--soaring and grovelling, dirt and d...eity--all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »