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I’ve always yearned to be a black man, to have a black man’s soul, a black man's laughter. You know why? Because I thought you were diflFerent from us. Yes, I thought you were something special, something difiFerent on this sad earth of ours. I wanted to escape with you from the white man’s hollow materialism, from his lack of faith, his humble and frustrated sexuality, from his lack of joy, of laughter, of magic, of faith in the richness of after-life.
encouragement and signs of gratitude or recognition have been very few, if any, along my road.
If humanity can be compared to a tribe, then you may say I’m completely de-tribalized.
You love Negroes out of sheer misanthropy, because you think they aren’t really men.
in the end all human faces look alike
with nothing bright or hopeful around me, except those distant stars— and even there, let’s be frank: it’s only their distance that gives them that purity and beauty
ideals don't die— obliged to live on shit sometimes, but don’t die!
the company a great cause always keeps: men of good will and those who exploit them
your skin, you know, is worth no more than the elephants’ hide. In Gennany, at Belsen, during the war, it seems we used to make lampshades out of human skin— for your information. And don’t forget, Monsieur Saint- Denis, that we Germans have always been forerunners in everything
‘Women,’ I concluded rather bitterly, ‘have at their command certain means of persuasion which the best- organized police forces do not possess.’
The number of animals who lived in cruel suffering, sometimes for years, with bullets in their bodies, wounds growing deeper and deeper, gangrenous and swarming with ticks and flies, could not be estimated
to change species, to come over to the elephants and live in the wilds among honest animals
Always cheerful, with the cheerfulness of a man who has gone deep down into things and come back reassured.
No one knew the desert better than Scholscher, who had spent so many nights alone there on the starlit dunes, and no one understood better than he did that need for protection which sometimes grips men’s hearts and drives them to give a dog the affection they dream so desperately of receiving themselves.
by ‘defending the splendors of nature . . .’ He meant liberty.”
Islam calls that ’the roots of heaven.’ and to the Mexican Indians it is of life’— the thing that makes both of
them fall on their knees and raise their eyes and beat their tormented breasts. A need for protection and company, from which obstinate people like Morel try to escape by means of petitions, fighting committees, by trying to take the protection of species in their own hands. Our needs- for justice, for freedom and dignity— are roots of heaven that are deeply imbedded in our hearts, but of heaven itself men know nothing but the gripping roots ...”
. . . And that girl sitting there in front of him with her legs crossed, with her nylon stockings and cigarette and that silent gaze, in which could be read that stubborn need, not so different from what Morel had seen in the eyes of the stray dogs at the pound.
but not even all that was comic and childish about him could deprive him of the dignity conferred upon him by his love for his Maker.
that human mass whose physical strength was nothing compared to the faith and spirit that dwelt in him.
Three quarters of the Oul6 traditions and magic rites had to do with war or hunting
while it's easy to suppress a magic tradition it's difficult to fill up the strange voids which it leaves in what you call the primitive psychology and what I call the human soul
The roots of heaven are forever planted in their hearts, yet of heaven itself they seem to know nothing but the gripping roots
It must be very consoling to take refuge in cynicism and to try and drown your own remorse in a consoling vision of universal swinishness, and you can always
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