Final Quotes
Nella Larsen - Passing
"Catlike. Certainly that was the word which best described Clare Kendry, if any sin- gle word could describe her."
Langston Hughes - The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain
"But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America - this urge within the race toward whiteness"
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
" His family were enormously wealthy--even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach--but now he'd left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that."
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
" Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete."
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
""Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read 'The Rise of the Colored Empires' by this man Goddard?"
Nella Larsen - Passing
""Exactly! And you're trying to make a molly-coddle out of him. Well, just let me tell you, I won't have it. And you needn't think I'm going to let you change him to some nice kindergarten kind of a school because he's get- ting a little necessary education. I won't! He'll stay right where he is. The sooner and the more he learns about sex, the better for him. And most certainly if he learns that it's a grand joke, the greatest in the world. It'll keep him from lots of disappointments later on.""
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
""It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the last ones left on the train. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes, and I couldn't keep my eyes off him, but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his head. When we came into the station he was next to me, and his white shirt-front pressed against my arm, and so I told him I'd have to call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him I didn't hardly know I wasn't getting into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.'""
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"'I wouldn't ask too much of her,' I ventured. 'You can't repeat the past.' 'Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!'"
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"... One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. "
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water"
Claude McKay - America
"Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth! Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate. Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood."
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
"Because we're the good guys. Yes.And we're carrying the fire.And we're carrying the fire. Yes.Okay."
Nella Larsen - Passing
"Before them stood John Bellew, speech- less now in his hurt and anger. Beyond them the little huddle of other people, and Brian stepping out from among them. What happened next, Irene Redfield never afterwards allowed herself to remember. Never clearly."
Nella Larsen - Passing
"Brian's head came round with a jerk. His brows lifted In an odd surprise. Her voice, she realized, had gone queer. But she had an Instinctive feeling that It hadn't been the whole cause of his attitude. And that little straightening motion of the shoulders. Hadn't It been like that of a man drawing him- self up to receive a blow? Her fright was like a scarlet spear of terror leaping at her heart. Clare Kendry! So that was It! Impos- sible. It couldn't be."
Langston Hughes - The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain
"But jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul--the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work;"
Nella Larsen - Passing
"But she mustn't, she warned herself, think of that. She was too tired, and too shocked. And, indeed, both were true. She was utterly weary, and she was violently staggered. But her thoughts reeled on."
Nella Larsen - Passing
"But that was as far as she got in her rehearsal. For Clare had come softly into the room without knocking, and before Irene could greet her, had dropped a kiss on her dark curls."
Nella Larsen - Passing
"Clare stood at the window, as composed as if everyone were not staring at her in curi- osity and wonder, as if the whole structure of her life were not lying In fragments before her. She seemed unaware of any danger or uncaring. There was even a faint smile on her full, red lips, and in her shining eyes. "
Nella Larsen - Passing
"Crossing the avenue In the heat, far from the coolness of the Drayton's roof, away from the seduction of Clare Kendry's smile, she was aware of a sense of Irritation with her- self because she had been pleased and a little flattered at the other's obvious gladness at their meeting."
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known."
Nella Larsen - Passing
"Everything was in confusion. The men had sprung forward. Felise had leapt between them and Bellew. She said quickly: "Careful. You're the only white man here." And the silver chill of her voice, as well as her words, was a warn- ing. "
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning—— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
"He banked the fire against the seam of rock where he'd built it and he strung the tarp behind them to reflect the heat and they sat warm in their refuge while he told the boy stories. Old stories of courage and justice as he remembered them until the boy was asleep in his blankets and then he stoked the fire and lay down warm and full and listened to the low thunder of the falls beyond them in that dark and threadbare wood."
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
"He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then hejust sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke."
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
"He took the cup and moved away and when he moved the light moved with him. He'd wanted to try and make a tent out of the tarp but the man would not let him. He said that he didnt want anything covering him. He lay watching the boy at the fire. He wanted to be able to see. Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth's long chronicle who's not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right."
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father's Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end."
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
"He watched him come through the grass and kneel with the cup of water he'd fetched. There was light all about him. He took the cup and drank and lay back. They had for food a single tin of peaches but he made the boy eat it and he would not take any. I cant, he said. It's all right. I'll save your half. Okay. You save it until tomorrow."
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and, walking through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips, and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice:"
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven--a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax."
Alain Locke - The New Negro
"His has been a stock figure perpetuated as an historical fiction partly in innocent sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reactionism."
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
"Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous. Jesus, he whispered. Then one by one they turned and blinked in the pitiful light. Help us, they whispered. Please help us.Christ, he said. Oh Christ. He turned and grabbed the boy."
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth."
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was that afternoon"
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor Daisy peremptorily called: "Wait!""
Alice Nelson - I Sit and Sew
"I sit and sew - a useless task it seems My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams— The panoply of war, the martial tred of men, Grim-faced, stern-eyed, gazing beyond the ken Of lesser souls, whose eyes have not seen Death, Nor learned to hold their lives but as a breath— But—I must sit and sew."
Alice Nelson - I Sit and Sew
"I sit and sew—my heart aches with desire— That pageant terrible, that fiercely pouring fire On wasted fields, and writhing grotesque things Once men. My soul in pity flings Appealing cries, yearning only to go There in that holocaust of hell, those fields of woe— But—I must sit and sew."
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"I suppose he'd had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people—his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself."
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"I told that boy about the ice." Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. "These people! You have to keep after them all the time." She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there."
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything." Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. "Sophisticated--God, I'm sophisticated!""
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men."
Nella Larsen - Passing
"In fact, so much was it what she had desired and expected that after the first deep cooling drink she was able to forget It, only now and then sipping, a little absently, from the tall green glass, while she surveyed the room about her or looked out over some lower buildings at the bright un- stirred blue of the lake reaching away to an undetected horizon. She had been gazing down for some time at the specks of cars and people creeping about in streets, and thinking how silly they looked."
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since."
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
"In the morning he lay looking up at the clay nests that swallows had built in the corners under the bridge. He looked at the boy but the boy had turned away and lay staring out at the river. There's nothing we could have done. He didnt answer. He's going to die. We cant share what we have or we'll die too. I know. So when are you going to talk to me again? I'm talking now."
Alain Locke - The New Negro
"In this new group psychology we note the lapse of sentimental appeal, then the development of a more positive self-respect and self-reliance; the repudiation of social dependence, and then the gradual recovery from hyper-sensitiveness and "touchy" nerves, the repudiation of the double standard of judgment with its special philanthropic allowances and then the sturdier desire for objective and scientific appraisal; and finally the rise from social disillusionment to race pride, from the sense of social debt to the responsibilities of social contribution, and offsetting the necessary working and commonsense acceptance of restricted conditions, the belief in ultimate esteem and recognition."
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
"In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped with shoddy. Towing wagons or carts. Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland."
Nella Larsen - Passing
"Into the dark rain and puzzling again over that look on Clare's incredibly beautiful face. She couldn't, however, come to any conclusion about Its meaning, try as she might. It was un- fathomable, utterly beyond any experience or comprehension of hers."
Nella Larsen - Passing
"Irene wasn't sorry. She was amazed, in- credulous almost. What would the others think? That Clare had fallen? That she had deliberately leaned backward? Certainly one or the other. Not— "
Nella Larsen - Passing
"Irene's lips trembled almost uncontrol- lably, but she made a desperate effort to fight back her disastrous desire to laugh again, and succeeded. Carefully selecting a cigarette from the lacquered box on the tea-table before her, she turned an oblique look on Clare and en- countered her peculiar eyes fixed on her with an expression so dark and deep and unfathom- able that she had for a short moment the sen- sation of gazing into the eyes of some creature utterly strange and apart."
Nella Larsen - Passing
"It was on that day of all others that Irene set out to shop for the things which she had promised to take home from Chicago to her two small sons, Brian junior and Theo- dore."
Nella Larsen - Passing
"It was only that she wanted him to be happy, resenting, however, his inability to be so with things as they were, and never acknowl- edging that though she did want him to be happy. It was only In her own way and by some plan of hers for him that she truly desired him to be so. Nor did she admit that all other plans, all other ways, she regarded as menaces, more or less Indirect, to that security of place and substance which she Insisted upon for her sons and in a lesser degree for herself."
Nella Larsen - Passing
"It was that smile that maddened Irene. She ran across the room, her terror tinged with ferocity, and laid a hand on Clare's bare arm. One thought possessed her. She couldn't have Clare Kendry cast aside by Bellew. She couldn't have her free."
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career—when he saw Dan Cody's yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a row-boat, pulled out to the TUOLOMEE and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour."
Nella Larsen - Passing
"Just as she'd always had that pale gold hair, which, unsheared still, was drawn loosely back from a broad brow, partly hidden by the small close hat. Her lips, painted a brilliant geranium-red, were sweet and sensitive and a little obstinate. A tempting mouth. The face across the forehead and cheeks was a trifle too wide, but the ivory skin had a peculiar soft lustre. And the eyes were magnificent! dark, sometimes absolutely black, always luminous, and set in long, black lashes. Arresting eyes, slow and mesmeric, and with, for all their warmth, something withdrawn and secret about them."
Countee Cullen - Heritage
"Lord, I fashion dark gods, too, Daring even to give You Dark despairing features where, Crowned with dark rebellious hair, Patience wavers just so much as Mortal grief compels, while touches Quick and hot, of anger, rise To smitten cheek and weary eyes."
Countee Cullen - Heritage
"My conversion came high-priced; I belong to Jesus Christ, Preacher of humility; Heathen gods are naught to me. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, So I make an idle boast;"
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day."
Nella Larsen - Passing
"Nevertheless, Irene felt, in turn, anger, scorn, and fear slide over her. It wasn't that she was ashamed of being a Negro, or even of having it declared. It was the idea of being ejected from any place, even in the polite and tactful way in which the Drayton would prob- ably do it, that disturbed her."
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
"No smoke from the dead fire. Nothing to be seen of the cart. He wallowed into the ground and lay watching across his forearm. An army in tennis shoes, tramping. Carrying three-foot lengths of pipe with leather wrappings. Lanyards at the wrist. Some of the pipes were threaded through with lengths of chain fitted at their ends with every manner of bludgeon. They clanked past, marching with a swaying gait like wind-up toys. Bearded, their breath smoking through their masks. Shh, he said. Shh."
Langston Hughes - Jazzonia
"Oh, silver tree! Oh, shining rivers of the soul! In a Harlem cabaret Six long-headed jazzers play. A dancing girl whose eyes are bold Lifts high a dress of silken gold."
Countee Cullen - Heritage
"One three centuries removed From the scenes his fathers loved, Spicy grove, cinnamon tree, What is Africa to me?"
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
"People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides. Others would come to help them. Within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. The screams of the murdered. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road. What had they done?"
Langston Hughes - Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret
"Play that thing, Jazz band! Play it for the lords and ladies, For the dukes and counts, For the whores and gigolos, For the American millionaires, And the school teachers Our for a spree."
Nella Larsen - Passing
"Rage boiled up in her. There was a slight crash. On the floor at her feet lay the shattered cup. Dark stains dotted the bright rug. Spread. The chatter stopped. Went on. Before her, Zulena gathered up the white fragments."
Alain Locke - The New Negro
"Similarly the mind of the Negro seems suddenly to have slipped from under the tyranny of social intimidation and to be shaking off the psychology of imitation and implied inferiority."
Alain Locke - The New Negro
"So for generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being --a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be "kept down," or "in his place," or "helped up," to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden."
Alain Locke - The New Negro
"So the choice is not between one way for the Negro and another way for the rest, but between American institutions frustrated on the one hand and American ideals progressively fulfilled and realized on the other."
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
"Such as what? I should have done it a long time ago. When there were three bullets in the gun instead of two. I was stupid. We've been over all of this. I didnt bring myself to this. I was brought. And now I'm done. I thought about not even telling you. That would probably have been best. You have two bullets and then what? You cant protect us. You say you would die for us but what good is that? I'd take him with me if it werent for you. You know I would. It's the right thing to do."
Alain Locke - The New Negro
"The Negro today is inevitably moving forward under the control largely of his own objectives. What are these objectives? Those of his outer life are happily already well and finally formulated, for they are none other than the ideals of American institutions and democracy."
Alain Locke - The New Negro
"The answer is no; not because the New Negro is not here, but because the Old Negro had long become more of a myth than a man."
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
"The boy squatted and put a hand on his shoulder. He's scared, Papa. The man is scared. He looked up the road and down. If this is an ambush he goes first, he said. He's just scared, Papa. Tell him we wont hurt him."
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
"The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? she said. He didnt answer. He went into the bathroom and threw the lightswitch but the power was already gone. A dull rose glow in the windowglass."
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
"The handmade brick of the house kilned out of the dirt it stood on. The peeling paint hanging in long dry sleavings down the columns and from the buckled soffits. A lamp that hung from a long chain overhead. The boy clung to him as they climbed the steps. One of the windows was slightly open and a cord ran from it and across the porch to vanish in the grass. He held the boy's hand and they crossed the porch. Chattel slaves had once trod those boards bearing food and drink on silver trays."
Langston Hughes - The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain
"The idea that white is right- stands in the way of African Americans and that they have to overcome this urge "But then there are the low-down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority--may the Lord be praised! The people who have their nip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round."
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged."
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption—and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them goodbye."
Alice Nelson - I Sit and Sew
"The little useless seam, the idle patch; Why dream I here beneath my homely thatch, When there they lie in sodden mud and rain, Pitifully calling me, the quick ones and the slain? You need me, Christ! It is no roseate dream That beckons me—this pretty futile seam, It stifles me—God, must I sit and sew?"
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
"The phalanx following carried spears or lances tasseled with ribbons, the long blades hammered out of trucksprings in some crude forge up-country. The boy lay with his face in his arms, terrified. They passed two hundred feet away, the ground shuddering lightly. Tramping. Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each. All passed on. They lay listening."
Claude McKay - Africa
"The sun sought thy dim bed and brought forth light, The sciences were sucklings at thy breast; When all the world was young in pregnant night Thy slaves toiled at thy monumental best. Thou ancient treasure-land, thou modern prize, New peoples marvel at thy pyramids!"
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one, and yet to avoid all eyes."
Alain Locke - The New Negro
"The thinking Negro even has been induced to share this same general attitude, to focus his attention on controversial issues, to see himself in the distorted perspective of a social problem"
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
"The wet gray flakes twisting and falling out of nothing. Gray slush by the roadside. Black water running from under the sodden drifts of ash. No more balefires on the distant ridges. He thought the bloodcults must have all consumed one another. No one traveled this road. No road-agents, no marauders."
Claude McKay - Africa
"The years roll on, thy sphinx of riddle eyes Watches the mad world with immobile lids. The Hebrews humbled them at Pharaoh's name. Cradle of Power! Yet all things were in vain! Honor and Glory, Arrogance and Fame! They went. The darkness swallowed thee again. Thou art the harlot, now thy time is done, Of all the mighty nations of the sun. "
Nella Larsen - Passing
"Then she was capable of scratching, and very effectively too. Or, driven to anger, she would fight with a ferocity and impetuousness that disregarded or forgot any danger; superior strength, numbers, or other unfavourable cir- cumstances."
Nella Larsen - Passing
"There had been, even In those days, nothing sacrificial In Clare Kendry's Idea of life, no allegiance beyond her own Immediate desire. She was selfish, and cold, and hard. And yet she had, too, a strange capacity of trans- forming warmth and passion, verging some- times almost on theatrical heroics."
Nella Larsen - Passing
"There was a gasp of horror, and above it a sound not quite human, like a beast In agony. "Nig! My God! Nig!""
Langston Hughes - The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain
"They live on Seventh Street in Washington or State Street in Chicago and they do not particularly care whether they are like white folks or anybody else. Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy. Their religion soars to a shout. Work maybe a little today, rest a little tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing awhile. O, let's dance! These common people are not afraid of spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and jazz is their child. They furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of American standardization."
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
"They walked out through the woods. The light was failing. They followed the flats along the upper river among huge dead trees. A rich southern wood that once held may-apple and pipsissewa. Ginseng."
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing--my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police."
Alain Locke - The New Negro
"To all of this the New Negro is keenly responsive as an augury of a new democracy in American culture. He is contributing his share to the new social understanding. But the desire to be understood would never in itself have been sufficient to have opened so completely the protectively closed portals of the thinking Negro's mind."
Nella Larsen - Passing
"What if Clare was not dead? She felt nauseated, as much at the idea of the glorious body mutilated as from fear."
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
"What in God's name are you talking about? We're not survivors. We're the walking dead in a horror film. I'm begging you. I dont care. I dont care if you cry. It doesnt mean anything to me. Please. Stop it. I am begging you. I'll do anything."
Countee Cullen - Heritage
"What is Africa to me: Copper sun or scarlet sea, Jungle star or jungle track, Strong bronzed men, or regal black Women from whose loins I sprang When the birds of Eden sang?"
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever"
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone. "Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved." "Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we ——" "Well, these books are all scientific,""
Countee Cullen - Heritage
"Wishing He I served were black, Thinking then it would not lack Precedent of pain to guide it, Let who would or might deride it; Surely then this flesh would know Yours had borne a kindred woe. "
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
"You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."
Langston Hughes - Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret
"You know that tune That laughs and cries at the same time May I? Mais oui, Mein Gott! Parece una rumba. Play it, jazz band!"
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
"You're not the one who has to worry about everything. The boy said something but he couldnt understand him. What? he said. He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one."
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
"there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the 'creative temperament'— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again."
Nella Larsen - Passing
''Every day I went to that nasty little post-office place. I'm sure they were all beginning to think that I'd been carry- ing on an illicit love-affair and that the man had thrown me over."
Countee Cullen - Heritage
Jesus of the twice-turned cheek, "Lamb of God, although I speak With my mouth thus, in my heart Do I play a double part. Ever at Thy glowing altar Must my heart grow sick and falter"
Langston Hughes - Jazzonia
Oh, shining tree! Oh, silver rivers of the soul! In a whirling cabaret Six long-headed jazzers play.
Langston Hughes - Jazzonia
Were Eve's eyes In the first garden Just a bit too bold? Was Cleopatra gorgeous In a gown of gold?
Claude McKay - America
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state, I stand within her walls with not a shred Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer. Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, And see her might and granite wonders there, Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand, Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
