It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live; and if at forty on...e can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac's own estimate, one has lived in vain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For women ... poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we can ...predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hearing your words, and not a word among them Tuned to my liking, on a salty day... When inland woods were pushed by winds, that flung them Hissing to leeward like a ton of spray,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The philosophical I is not the human being, not the human body or the human soul with the psychological properties, but the metaph...ysical subject, the boundary (not a part) of the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
These doctors, they've got no mercy on you, 'specially if you're black. Ah! I've seen 'em, many a time, but, they never come after... me, I never gave 'em a chance--not the first time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is the problem of women's freedom? It seems to me to be this: how to arrange the world so that women can be human beings, wit...h a chance to exercise their infinitely varied gifts in infinitely varied ways, instead of being destined by the accident of their sex to one field of activity--housework and child-raising. And second, if and when they choose housework and child-raising to have that occupation recognized by the world as work, requiring a definite economic reward and not merely entitling the performer to be dependent on some man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is only when we speak what is right that we stand a chance at night of being blown to bits in our homes. Can we call this a fre...e country, when I am afraid to go to sleep in my own home in Mississippi?... I might not live two hours after I get back home, but I want to be a part of setting the Negro free in Mississippi.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »