The only Revolution that can really change the world is the one in your own consciousness, and mine has already begun.
Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.
You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human. . . . And although you don't have complete control over the narrative (no author does, I can tell you), you could nevertheless create it.
The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean.
And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still, it moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.
Black people's music is in a class by itself and always has been. There's nothing like it. The reason for that is because it was not tampered with by white people. It was not on the media. It was not anywhere except where black people were. And it is one of the art forms in which black people decided what is good in it. Nobody told them. What surfaced and what floated to the top, were the giants and the best.
It's like there are all these languages available, especially in terms of image. Why confine yourself to only English? There's all these languages and possibilities and concepts to speak or communicate with.
I knew a wise man that had it for a by-word, when he saw men hasten to a conclusion, "Stay a little, that we may make an end the sooner. "
You will notice already that Mr. Baggins was not quite so prosy as he liked to believe, also that he was very fond of flowers.
Suppose God wants to teach you to say, "I know how to be abased"--are you ready to be offered up like that? Are you ready to be not so much as a drop in a bucket--to be so hopelessly insignificant that you are never thought of again in connection with the life you served? Are you willing to spend and be spent; not seeking to be ministered unto, but to minister?