In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood... before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Oh, the holiness of always being the injured party. The historically oppressed can find not only sanctity but safety in the state ...of victimization. When access to a better life has been denied often enough, and successfully enough, one can use the rejection as an excuse to cease all efforts. After all, one reckons, "they" don't want me, "they" accept their own mediocrity and refuse my best, "they" don't deserve me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When the excessively shy force themselves to be forward, they are frequently surprisingly unsubtle and overdirect and even rude: t...hey have entered an extreme region beyond their normal personality, an area of social crime where gradations don't count; unavailable to them are the instincts and taboos that booming extroverts, who know the territory of self-advancement far better, can rely on.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, ...excessive ... and impoverished.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As between these two, the need that in its haste to be abolished cannot pause to be stated and the need that is the absolute predi...cament of particular human identity, one does not presume to suggest a relation of worth. Yet the distinction is perhaps not idle, for it is from the failure to make it that proceeds the common rejection as "obscure" of most that is significant in modern music, painting and literature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Heavens. Once an object of superstition, awe and fear. Now a vast region for growing knowledge. The distance of Venus, the atm...osphere of Mars, the size of Jupiter, and the speed of Mercury. All this and more we know. But their greatest mystery the heavens have kept a secret. What sort of life, if any, inhabits these other planets? Human life, like ours? Or life extremely lower in the scale. Or dangerously higher.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... most Southerners of my parents' era were raised to feel that it wasn't respectable to be rich. We felt that all patriotic Sout...herners had lost everything in defense of the South, and sufficient time hadn't elapsed for respectable rebuilding of financial security in a war- impoverished region.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... not only have we exploited them physically and economically to bring ease to our bodies and our purses, but also we have explo...ited them emotionally to bring us many sublimated satisfactions. Our relationship with Negroes is a many-stringed instrument upon which we play melodies to replenish all the empty places in our hearts.... The parent-child relationship is almost consciously acted out, with the obedience, seeming respect, and acceptance by "our Nigras" going far toward soothing heartaches for the rebellion, arrogance, and rejection we must endure as our real children seize their own lives from us in adolescence. Even the reverse, the child-parent role, is sometimes filled, as we play the part of babyhood helplessness, satisfying immature longings to be waited on and taken care of.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »