A great wind swept over the ghetto, carrying away shame, invisibility and four centuries of humiliation. But when the wind dropped people saw it had been only a little breeze, friendly, almost gentle. |
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness. |
Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity. |
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man. |
Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile. |
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger. |
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty-a sunken beauty. |
I'm homosexual... How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green. |
Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me. |
Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun. |
Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it. |
The Blacks: A Clown Show |
The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them. |
The force of what was called Panther rhetoric or word mongering resided not in elegant discourse but in strength of affirmation (or denial), in anger of tone and timbre. When the anger led to action there was no turgidity or over-emphasis. Anyone who has witnessed political rows among the Whites will have to admit that the Whites aren't overburdened with poetic imagination. |
The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology. |