Run fast, stand still. This, the lesson from lizards. For all writers. Observe almost any survival creature, you see the same. Jum...p, run, freeze. In the ability to flick like an eyelash, crack like a whip, vanish like steam, here this instant, gone the next--life teems the earth. And when that life is not rushing to escape, it is playing statues to do the same. See the hummingbird, there, not there. As thought arises and blinks off, so this thing of summer vapor; the clearing of a cosmic throat, the fall of a leaf. And where it was--a whisper. What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping. In between the scurries and flights, what? Be a chameleon, ink- blend, chromosome change with the landscape. Be a pet rock, lie with the dust, rest in the rainwater in the filled barrel by the drainspout outside your grandparents' window long ago.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For mainstream American blacks, the vast majority of churches have Hebrew names--Ebenezer, Mount Zion, Canaan, Mount Moriah, Taber...nacle, New Hebron, Mount Olive. Hebraic traditions run deep in the black church. More than any people on earth, including the Jews, American blacks have adopted the Mosaic model of social organization, with the exalted political prophet bonded to the "children of Israel" below. Blacks and Jews have in common a history of cyclical swings between cultural separatism and assimilation. Black Zionists helped establish an independent Liberia in 1847, some fifty years before the emergence of modern Jewish Zionism. Jews, who have canonized no new prophets in two millennia and who shudder at the memory of their false messiahs, look with both longing and horror upon the last generation's procession of black prophets: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Louis Farrakhan, and Jesse Jackson. Depending on one's prediction of the outcome, blacks and Jews are either intimate enemies or quarrelsome cousins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Someone had literally run to earth In an old cellar hole in a byroad... The origin of all the family there. Thence they were sprung, so numerous a tribe That now not all the houses left in town Made shift to shelter them without the help Of here and there a tent in grove and orchard.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So, when old hopes that earth was bettering slowly Were dead and damned, there sounded 'War is done!'... One morrow. Said the bereft, and meek, and lowly, 'Will men some day be given to grace? yea, wholly, And in good sooth, as our dreams used to run?'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you feed a thousand people you are a nice man with suspicious motives. If you kill a thousand you are a hero. Continue to get t...hem killed by the thousands and you are a great conqueror than which nothing on earth is greater. Oppress them and you are a great ruler. Rob them by law and they are proud and happy if you let them glimpse you occasionally surrounded by the riches that you have trampled out of their hides. You are truly divine if you meet their weakness with the sword to slay and the dogs to tear. The only time you run great risk is when you serve them. The most repulsive thing to all men is gratitude. Men give up property, freedom and even life before they will have the obligation laid on them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,... Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt... you, But make allowance for their doubting you; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:... If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings--nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight... before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap, the coffee, the rice, to iron the pants, to braid the hair, to pull the day's water up from the well, to boil water for tea, to wash the children for school, to pull the vegetables and start the walk to market, to run to catch the bus for the work that is paid. I don't know when most women sleep!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Turn your eyes to the immoderate past, Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising... Demons out of the earth--they will not last. Stonewall, Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp, Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »