I have no doubt that there are great people about though. . . the thing of it is, nothing to this day moves me like classical music (Debussy, Vaughn Williams).
All pornography is to a degree sadistic - inevitably.
Failures to love are irremediable and irredeemable.
One of the uncovenanted benefits of living for a long time is that, having so many more dead than living friends, death can appear as a step backwards into the joyous past.
In what touches their social convictions, most persons do not think. The threat of change, with all it suggests to them in the loss of social and economic privilege, alarms so deeply that they are incapable of unprejudiced thought. They seem to themselves to be thinking, with lucidity and fairness, but since they start from the conviction that change must undoubtedly be for the worse or from settled grief at the thought of losing what is old and lovely, they are doing no more than following a logical sequence of ideas from a false premise.
. . . we do not remember people as they were. What we remember is the effect they had on us then, but we remember it through an emotion charged with all that has since happened to us.
Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.
All of us, as bodies, are in the active position of figuring out how to live with and against the constructions - or norms - that help to form us.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said when the children of Israel rebelled against Moses and Aaron and did not want to leave their slavemaster to build an independent nation of their own under the guidance of God, God chastised them with fiery serpents and cockatrices. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad asked me one day, "do you know what it means fiery serpents"? I said, "no sir. " He said, "It means angry White people. "
The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new.
Many married women who have deliberately spurned the "hour" of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving themselves, they lost themselves!