When I am writing a novel I must actually live the lives of my characters. If, for instance, my hero is a gambler on the French Ri...viera, I must make myself pack up and go to Cannes or Nice, willy-nilly, and there throw myself into the gay life of the gambling set until I really feel that I am Paul De Lacroix, or Ed Whelen, or whatever my hero's name is. Of course this runs into money, and I am quite likely to have to change my ideas about my hero entirely and make him a bum on a tramp steamer working his way back to America, or a young college boy out of funds who lives by his wits until his friends at home send him a hundred and ten dollars.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Gentleman, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot. I im...plore you, send him back to his father and brothers who are waiting for him with open arms in the penitentiary. I suggest that we give him ten years in Levenworth or eleven years in Twelveworth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Two kinds of symbol must surely be distinguished. The algebraic symbol comes naked into the world of mathematics and is clothed wi...th value by its masters. A poetic symbol--like the Rose, for Love, in Guillaume de Lorris--comes trailing clouds of glory from the real world, clouds whose shape and colour largely determine and explain its poetic use. In an equation, x and y will do as well as a and b; but the Romance of the Rose could not, without loss, be re-written as the Romance of the Onion, and if a man did not see why, we could only send him back to the real world to study roses, onions, and love, all of them still untouched by poetry, still raw.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a destiny that makes us brothers; None goes his way alone:... All that we send into the lives of others Comes back into our own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Back and side go bare, go bare, Both foot and hand go cold;... But belly, God send thee good ale enough; Whether it be new or old!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country. I believe the thought would ...drive me mad on my death-bed could I suppose that any of my friends would be base enough to convey my carcass back to her soil. I would not even feed her worms if I could help it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... there is a dangerous trend observable in some quarters of the Movement to program Sapphire out of her "evil" ways into a cover...-up, shut-up, lay-back-and-be-cool obedience role. She is being assigned an unreal role of mute servant that supposedly neutralizes the acidic tension that exists between Black men and Black women. She is being encouraged--in the name of revolution no less--to cultivate "virtues" that if listed would sound like the personality traits of slaves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At about that time I was once sitting at my place and whispering--it was naughty, I know--with my neighbor. Then you, Herr Profess...or Rudner, got up from your desk, came calmly down the aisle to me: "Did you speak?" and slapped me smack in the face. And I--the fury is inside me to this day--I didn't hit back. Such were the methods of objectivity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »