Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. |
Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it. |
Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values. |
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike. |
The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas. Or, as Emerson insisted, the development of consciousness, consciousness, consciousness. |
The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing. |
The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing. |
The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead. |
The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life. |
There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers. |
There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale. |
When I discover who I am, I'll be free. |