I respect the ways of old folks, but the blood of a rooster or a goat cannot turn the seasons, change the course of the clouds and... fill them up with water like bladders. The other night, at the ceremony for Legba, I danced and sang my fill: I am a black man, no? and I enjoyed it like a true Negro should. When the drums beat, I feel it in the pit of my stomach, I feel the itch in my hips and up and down my legs, I have got to join the party. But that is all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into... my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's sto...mach the separation from terra ... these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known ... this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The little Strangs say the "good words," as they call them, before going to bed, aloud and at their father's knee, or rather in th...e pit of his stomach. One of them was lately heard to say "Forgive us our christmasses as we forgive them that christmas against us."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The darkest pit Of the profoundest hell, chaos, night,... Nor aught of blinder vacancy scooped out By help of dreams can breed such fear and awe As fall upon us often when we look Into our minds, into the mind of man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great snake lies ever half awake, at the bottom of the pit of the world, curled In folds of himself until he awakens in h...unger and moving his head to right and to left prepares for his hour to devour.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most commonly revolt is born of material circumstances; but insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. Revolt is Masaniello, who l...ed the Neapolitan insurgents in 1647; but insurrection is Spartacus. Insurrection is a thing of the spirit, revolt is a thing of the stomach.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are those who would keep us slipping back into the darkness of division, into the snake pit of racial hatred, of racial anta...gonism and of support for symbols of the struggle to keep African-Americans in bondage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »