Portrait Black And White Quotes

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He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights. 'White to play and mate in two moves.' Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.
George Orwell (1984)
Away! Away! The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone. Come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth... Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
The truth is that no matter how long and hard you try—you cannot struggle your way out of a straitjacket that does not exist. But pretending it exists, for whatever the reason, really does leave you in a severely restricted posture.
Thomas Chatterton Williams (Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race)
We maintain, therefore, that the first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy is the Plot; and that the Characters come second—compare the parallel in painting, where the most beautiful colours laid on without order will not give one the same pleasure as a simple black-and-white sketch of a portrait.
Aristotle (The Rhetoric & The Poetics of Aristotle)
(Frances Ellen Watkins Harper) "In closing, Harper challenged the white women in the audience to stand by their black sisters, to look beyond their own white privilege. “You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs,” she reminded them. “Talk of giving women the ballot-box? … While there exists this brutal element in society which tramples upon the feeble and treads down the weak, I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.
Kate Clifford Larson (Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero)
She had been looking all round her again—at the lawn, the great trees, the reedy, silvery Thames, the beautiful old house; and while engaged in this survey she had made room in it for her companions; a comprehensiveness of observation easily conceivable on the part of a young woman who was evidently both intelligent and excited. She had seated herself and had put away the little dog; her white hands, in her lap, were folded upon her black dress; her head was erect, her eye lighted, her flexible figure turned itself easily this way and that, in sympathy with the alertness with which she evidently caught impressions. Her impressions were numerous, and they were all reflected in a clear, still smile. "I've never seen anything so beautiful as this.
Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)
Black and white could lie. She knew that better than anyone. It was no great thing at all to take what was there, cut it out, and put it somewhere else instead, where it meant something entirely different.
Roseanna M. White (A Portrait of Loyalty (The Codebreakers, #3))
But history's utility, while necessary, is diminished greatly when it smothers the light of the present day, overshadowing the genuine possibility and beauty the here and now may contain . . . We have a responsibility to remember, yes, but we also have the right and I believe even the duty to continuously remake ourselves anew.
Thomas Chatterton Williams (Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race)
I have provided a possible explanation for Antiochus's insane foolhardiness when left in command of the Athenian Fleet, because Thucidides's bald account is so unbelievable (unless one assumes that both Antiochus and Alkibiades were mentally defective) that any explanation seems more likely than none. Alkibiades himself is an enigma. Even allowing that no man is all black and all white, few men can ever have been more wildly and magnificently piebald. Like another strange and contradictory character Sir Walter Raleigh, he casts a glamour that comes clean down the centuries, a dazzle of personal magnetism that makes it hard to see the man behind it. I have tried to see. I have tried to fit the pieces into a coherent whole; I don't know whether I have been successful or not; but I do not think that I have anywhere falsified the portrait.
Rosemary Sutcliff (The Flowers of Adonis)
When he reached the desk he handed Caroline a photograph in a dark blue cardboard frame. It was a portrait, black and white, faintly tinted. The woman looking out wore a pale peach sweater. Her hair was gently waved, her eyes a deep shade of blue. Rupert Dean's wife, Emelda, dead now for twenty years. "She was te love of my life," he announced to Caroline, his voice so loud that people looked up.
Kim Edwards (The Memory Keeper's Daughter)
One way or another, we are going to have to figure out how to make our multiethnic realities work, and one of the great intellectual projects facing us—in America and abroad—will be to develop a vision of ourselves strong and supple enough both to acknowledge the lingering importance of inherited group identities while also attenuating, rather than reinforcing, the extent to which such identities are able to define us.
Thomas Chatterton Williams (Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race)
APRIL 16. Away! Away! The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone—come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.
James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
If you tell Google that you would like to see images of ‘Black men’ the images that come up are all portrait photos of black men. Indeed, it takes more than a dozen rows of images before anybody who isn’t black comes up in the images. By contrast a search for ‘White men’ first throws up an image of David Beckham – who is white – but then the second is of a black model. From there every line of five images has either one or two black men in the line-up. Many of the images of white men are of people convicted of crimes with taglines such as ‘Beware of the average white man’ and ‘White men are bad’.
Douglas Murray (The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity)
Perfect knowledge is hallowed ground. It caresses you, cradles you with the barbed wire of truth. It grazes and tears at your flesh as though it ever really mattered- as if there were anything you could have done to stop it from penetrating you so completely. Revenge in the hand of your enemies is a loaded gun. You can beg them for mercy, wave the white flag of surrender, but the only true elixir for the vitriol they bestow is a measure of hatred dispensed of you own. Never lie down for the enemy. Never hand them the knife with which to slaughter you. The truth is a labyrinth. Secrets are the truths as sharp as razors ready to spread like a virus- ready to saw your existence in half. My truths came to light. They took shape in the form of my enemies until all of the color bled out from my world. It lacked the beauty and majesty of a black and white portrait. The landscape had glazed over in rusted tones of sepia-rancid-tarnished- with urine colored sky. My world glittered from the fragmented glass it had become. This is what I know. These are my truths.
Addison Moore (Wicked (Celestra, #4))
American photographer Nicholas Nixon has been taking a black-and-white portrait of his wife, Bebe Brown, and her three sisters, Heather, Mimi and Laurie, annually since 1975.
Mona Chollet (In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial)
So, it wasn’t until I was living in Mexico that I first started enjoying chocolate mousse. See, there was this restaurant called La Lorraine that became a favorite of ours when John and I were living in Mexico City in 1964–65. The restaurant was in a beautiful old colonial period house with a large courtyard, red tile floors, and a big black and white portrait of Charles de Gaulle on the wall. The proprietor was a hefty French woman with grey hair swept up in a bun. She always welcomed us warmly and called us mes enfants, “my children.” Her restaurant was very popular with the folks from the German and French embassies located nearby. She wasn’t too keen on the locals. I think she took to us because I practiced my French on her and you know how the French are about their language! At the end of each evening (yeah, we often closed the joint) madame was usually seated at the table next to the kitchen counting up the evening’s receipts. Across from her at the table sat a large French poodle, wearing a napkin bib and enjoying a bowl of onion soup. Ah, those were the days… Oh, and her mousse au chocolate was to DIE for!
Mallory M. O'Connor (The Kitchen and the Studio: A Memoir of Food and Art)
Watching Paris is Burning, I began to think that the many yuppie-looking, straight -acting, pushy, predominantly white folks in the audience were there because the film in no way interrogates “whiteness.” These folks left the film saying it was “amazing,” “marvellous,” incredibly funny,” worthy of statements like, “Didn’t you just love it?” And no, I didn’t love it. For in many ways the film was a graphic documentary portrait of the way in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit. The "we" evoked here is all of us, black people/people of color, who are daily bombarded by a powerful colonizing whiteness that seduces us away from ourselves, that negates that there is beauty to be found in any form of blackness that is not imitation whiteness.
bell hooks (Black Looks: Race and Representation)
In their places of worship, most Blacks are confronted every Sunday with early Renaissance portraits of Christ, a white deity, and a form of spirituality which theoretically and historically has little direct relevancy to their unique heritage and original Afrikan belief systems.
Anpu Unnefer Amen (The Meaning of Hotep: A Nubian Study Guide)
The summer getting is good, but no amount of talk or trade will encourage Mary to let any of the family up the trail, not today, today is important. The tables arranged in a circle. A bell placed under a special chair in the centre. Those lucky four allowed to come are dressed all in black like Mary and her husband. Mary stands on a box staring through a wall. It was her idea to remove the eyes from the white wolf portrait. It was beautiful and if Mary had of paid she might have thought twice before putting a knife to it, but it was a gift, Tabbot's has a secret admirer.
Bradley Heywood (Short Tales from Earth's Final Chapter: Book 2)
The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.
Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)
Frank Marshall Davis, the former Communist who was Obama’s mentor in Hawaii, was so radical that he opposed President Truman’s Marshall Plan as a “device” for maintaining “white imperialism.” Truman and Marshall, he wrote, were using “billions of U.S. dollars to bolster the tottering empires of England, France, Belgium, Holland and the other western exploiters of teeming millions.” Indeed the objective of America after World War II was “to re-enslave the yellow and brown and black peoples of the world.” While Davis spurned America he praised “Red Russia” as “my friend.”3 Young Obama—sitting in Davis’s hut in Hawaii week after week for several years—took it all in. This portrait of devoted young Obama imbibing the ravings of a pot-smoking former Communist is the progressive version of a Norman Rockwell painting.
Dinesh D'Souza (America: Imagine a World Without Her)
Frederick Douglass, an early convert, became a theorist of photography. “Negroes can never have impartial portraits at the hands of white artists,” he said. “It seems to us next to impossible for white men to take likenesses of black men, without most grossly exaggerating their distinctive features.” But a photograph was no caricature. Douglass therefore sat, again and again, in a portraitist’s studio: he became the most photographed man in nineteenth-century America, his likeness taken more often than Twain or even Lincoln.
Jill Lepore (These Truths: A History of the United States)
As he ran, he thought about everything and anything, about the life he’d led, the children, the snatches of time frozen in his mind: a moment when he’d gotten shot in an alley, and the flash of the man who’d shot him; the first sight of a newborn daughter; his mother’s face, crabby with an early morning slice of toast in her hand, her image as clear in his mind as it had been twenty-five years earlier, on the day she died…. They all came up like portraits and landscapes hanging on the wall of his memory, flashes of color in the black-and-white night.
John Sandford (Stolen Prey (Lucas Davenport #22))
The self-deception of slave owners and proponents of slavery is well documented by the historians Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in their book Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South. Slavery was not perceived by most slaveholders in the nineteenth century to be an exploitation of humans by other humans for economic gain; instead, slaveholders painted a portrait of slavery as a paternalistic and benign institution in which the slaves themselves were seen as not so different from all laborers—black and white—who toiled everywhere in both free and slave states; further, the South’s “Christian slavery” was claimed to be superior.
Michael Shermer (The Moral Arc: How Science Makes Us Better People)
Now, if I find liberation in moments of doubt, it comes with the one movement I always end up having to make, the only movement I can make—away from the abstract, general, and hypothetical and back into the jagged grain of the here and now, into the humanizing specificity of my love for my father, mother, brother, wife, and children, and into my sheer delight in their existence as distinct and irreplaceable people, not “bodies”—as contemporary lingo would have it—or avatars, sites of racial characteristics and traits, reincarnations of conflicts and prejudices past. Through these people I love, I am left with myself as the same, as a man and a human being who is free to choose and who has made choices and is not reducible to a set of historical circumstances and mistakes.
Thomas Chatterton Williams (Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race)
This journey by time capsule to the early 1940s is not always a pleasant one. It affords us a glimpse at the pre-civil rights South. This was true in the raw copy of the guidebooks as well. The Alabama guidebook copy referred to blacks as “darkies.” It originally described the city of Florence struggling through “the terrible reconstruction, those evil days when in bitter poverty, her best and bravest of them sleep in Virginia battlefields, her civilization destroyed . . . And now when the darkest hour had struck, came a flash of light, the forerunners of dawn. It was the Ku Klux Klan . . .” The Dover, Delaware, report stated that “Negroes whistle melodiously.” Ohio copy talked of their “love for pageantry and fancy dress.” Such embarrassingly racist passages were usually edited out, but the America Eats manuscripts are unedited, so the word darkies remains in a Kentucky recipe for eggnog. In the southern essays from America Eats, whenever there is dialogue between a black and a white, it reads like an exchange between a slave and a master. There also seems to be a racist oral fixation. Black people are always sporting big “grins.” A description of a Mississippi barbecue cook states, “Bluebill is what is known as a ‘bluegum’ Negro, and they call him the brother of the Ugly man, but personal beauty is not in the least necessary to a barbecue cook.
Mark Kurlansky (The Food of a Younger Land: A portrait of American food- before the national highway system, before chainrestaurants, and before frozen food, when the ... of American food from the lost WPA files)
Jobs later explained, “We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same, it’s think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.” In order to evoke the spirit of Dead Poets Society, Clow and Jobs wanted to get Robin Williams to read the narration. His agent said that Williams didn’t do ads, so Jobs tried to call him directly. He got through to Williams’s wife, who would not let him talk to the actor because she knew how persuasive he could be. They also considered Maya Angelou and Tom Hanks. At a fund-raising dinner featuring Bill Clinton that fall, Jobs pulled the president aside and asked him to telephone Hanks to talk him into it, but the president pocket-vetoed the request. They ended up with Richard Dreyfuss, who was a dedicated Apple fan. In addition to the television commercials, they created one of the most memorable print campaigns in history. Each ad featured a black-and-white portrait of an iconic historical figure with just the Apple logo and the words “Think Different” in the corner. Making it particularly engaging was that the faces were not captioned. Some of them—Einstein, Gandhi, Lennon, Dylan, Picasso, Edison, Chaplin, King—were easy to identify. But others caused people to pause, puzzle, and maybe ask a friend to put a name to the face: Martha Graham, Ansel Adams, Richard Feynman, Maria Callas, Frank Lloyd Wright, James Watson, Amelia Earhart. Most were Jobs’s personal heroes. They tended to be creative people who had taken risks, defied failure, and bet their career on doing things in a different way.
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
The Memory Business Steven Sasson is a tall man with a lantern jaw. In 1973, he was a freshly minted graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His degree in electrical engineering led to a job with Kodak’s Apparatus Division research lab, where, a few months into his employment, Sasson’s supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, approached him with a “small” request. Fairchild Semiconductor had just invented the first “charge-coupled device” (or CCD)—an easy way to move an electronic charge around a transistor—and Kodak needed to know if these devices could be used for imaging.4 Could they ever. By 1975, working with a small team of talented technicians, Sasson used CCDs to create the world’s first digital still camera and digital recording device. Looking, as Fast Company once explained, “like a ’70s Polaroid crossed with a Speak-and-Spell,”5 the camera was the size of a toaster, weighed in at 8.5 pounds, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel, and took up to thirty black-and-white digital images—a number chosen because it fell between twenty-four and thirty-six and was thus in alignment with the exposures available in Kodak’s roll film. It also stored shots on the only permanent storage device available back then—a cassette tape. Still, it was an astounding achievement and an incredible learning experience. Portrait of Steven Sasson with first digital camera, 2009 Source: Harvey Wang, From Darkroom to Daylight “When you demonstrate such a system,” Sasson later said, “that is, taking pictures without film and showing them on an electronic screen without printing them on paper, inside a company like Kodak in 1976, you have to get ready for a lot of questions. I thought people would ask me questions about the technology: How’d you do this? How’d you make that work? I didn’t get any of that. They asked me when it was going to be ready for prime time? When is it going to be realistic to use this? Why would anybody want to look at their pictures on an electronic screen?”6 In 1996, twenty years after this meeting took place, Kodak had 140,000 employees and a $28 billion market cap. They were effectively a category monopoly. In the United States, they controlled 90 percent of the film market and 85 percent of the camera market.7 But they had forgotten their business model. Kodak had started out in the chemistry and paper goods business, for sure, but they came to dominance by being in the convenience business. Even that doesn’t go far enough. There is still the question of what exactly Kodak was making more convenient. Was it just photography? Not even close. Photography was simply the medium of expression—but what was being expressed? The “Kodak Moment,” of course—our desire to document our lives, to capture the fleeting, to record the ephemeral. Kodak was in the business of recording memories. And what made recording memories more convenient than a digital camera? But that wasn’t how the Kodak Corporation of the late twentieth century saw it. They thought that the digital camera would undercut their chemical business and photographic paper business, essentially forcing the company into competing against itself. So they buried the technology. Nor did the executives understand how a low-resolution 0.01 megapixel image camera could hop on an exponential growth curve and eventually provide high-resolution images. So they ignored it. Instead of using their weighty position to corner the market, they were instead cornered by the market.
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
George Washington so liked Edward Savage’s painting of “The President and His Family, the full size of life,” that he ordered “four stipple engravings” in “handsome, but not costly, gilt frames, with glasses,” and hung one of his purchases over the fireplace mantel in the small dining room at Mount Vernon. As the Washington family—George and Martha, and two of Martha’s orphaned grandchildren, George Washington (“Washy”) and Eleanor (“Nelly”) Custis—took their daily repast, Edward Savage’s tableau of “The President and His Family” looked down upon them. It is likely that Washington favored the portrait above many others because of its intimacy and its affirmation of the future. The family gathers about a table at Mount Vernon, George seated at the left, opposite his wife, Martha. Washy, the younger of the two grandchildren, stands in the left foreground, while Nelly stands at the right in the middle ground. Washington rests his right hand upon the boy’s shoulder; Washy, in turn, holds a compass in his right hand, which he rests upon a globe, in a stance suggesting that succeeding generations of the family were destined to spread the ideals of liberty and democracy around the world. In the background, framed by large pillars and a swagged curtain, Savage presents a glimpse, as he said in a note, of “a view of thirty miles down the Potomac River.” On the table at the portrait’s center rests Andrew Ellicott’s map of the new federal seat of government. The family appears to be unrolling the document; Washington holds it flat with his left arm and sword, while Nelly and Martha steady it on the right. With her folded fan, Martha gestures to “the grand avenue,” as Savage called it, that connects the Capitol with the White House. In the right middle ground stands one of the chief contradictions of the new democracy, a nameless black male servant, part of the retinue of more than three hundred slaves the Washingtons depended upon for their comfort, security, and prosperity. Dressed in the colors of Mount Vernon livery, a gray coat over a salmon red waistcoat, he possesses an almost princely quality. His black, combed-back hair frames his dark face with its prominent nose. His unknowable eye impassively takes in the scene. He keeps his left hand enigmatically concealed in his waistcoat; his collar flamboyantly mirrors Washington’s across from him. The slave must remain a shadow, unobtrusive, unassuming, unremarkable, almost a part of the frame for the Potomac. Only the slave’s destiny seems apart from those gathered about the table examining the plans, yet from the beginning the fates of both slavery and the new city were inextricably intertwined. The nameless man’s story, along with the stories of tens of thousands of others, was very much a part of the plot unfolding on the Potomac in the 1790s. The consequences of involuntary servitude would affect and effect Washington’s development to the present day.
Tom Lewis (Washington: A History of Our National City)
Egalitarian Fiction and Collective Fraud” by Linda S. Gottfredson Society, Vol. 31, No. 3 March/April 1994, page 53 In the 1998 book The IQ Controversy: The Media and Public Policy by Psychologist-lawyer Marc Snyderman and political scientist Stanley Rothman provides strong evidence that the general public receives a highly distorted view of opinion among “IQ experts.” In essence, say Snyderman and Rothman, accounts in major national newspapers, newsmagazines, and television reports have painted a portrait of expert opinion that leaves the impression that “the majority if experts in the field believe it is impossible to adequately define intelligence, that intelligence tests to not measure anything that is relevant to life performance, and that they are biased against minorities, primarily blacks and Hispanics, as well as against the poor.” However, say the authors, the survey of experts revealed quite the opposite: "On the whole, scholars with any expertise in the area of intelligence and intelligence testing … share a common view of [what constitute] important components of intelligence, and are convinced that [intelligence] can be measured with some degree of accuracy. An overwhelming majority also believe that individual genetic inheritance contributes to variations in IQ within the white community, and a smaller majority express the same view about black-white and SES [socioeconomic] differences in IQ.
Linda Gottfredson
One way ot another, we are going to have to figure out how to make our multiethnic realities work, and one of the great intellectual projects facing us--in America and abroad--will be to develop a vision of ourselves strong and supple enough both to acknowledge the lingering importance of inherited group identities while also attenuating, rather than reinforcing, the extent to which such identities are able to define us.
Thomas Chatterton Williams (Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race)
It would be logical for any group whose only sense of identity is the negative one of wickedness and oppression to dilute its wickedness by mixing with more virtuous groups. This is, upon reflection, exactly what celebrating diversity implies. James Carignan, a city councilor in Lewiston, Maine, encouraged the city to welcome refugees from the West African country of Togo, writing, “We are too homogeneous at present. We desperately need diversity.” He said the Togolese—of whom it was not known whether they were literate, spoke English, or were employable—“will bring us the diversity that is essential to our quest for excellence.” Likewise in Maine, long-serving state’s attorney James Tierney wrote of racial diversity in the state: “This is not a burden. This is essential.” An overly white population is a handicap. Gwynne Dyer, a London-based Canadian journalist, also believes whites must be leavened with non-whites in a process he calls “ethnic diversification.” He noted, however, that when Canada and Australia opened their borders to non-white immigration, they had to “do good by stealth” and not explain openly that the process would reduce whites to a minority: “Let the magic do its work, but don’t talk about it in front of the children. They’ll just get cross and spoil it all.” Mr. Dyer looked forward to the day when politicians could be more open about their intentions of thinning out whites. President Bill Clinton was open about it. In his 2000 State of the Union speech, he welcomed predictions that whites would become a minority by mid-century, saying, “this diversity can be our greatest strength.” In 2009, before a gathering of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, he again brought up forecasts that whites will become a minority, adding that “this is a very positive thing.” [...] Harvard University professor Robert Putnam says immigrants should not assimilate. “What we shouldn’t do is to say that they should be more like us,” he says. “We should construct a new us.” When Marty Markowitz became the new Brooklyn borough president in 2002, he took down the portrait of George Washington that had hung in the president’s office for many years. He said he would hang a picture of a black or a woman because Washington was an “old white man.” [...] In 2000, John Sharp, a former Texas comptroller and senator told the state Democratic Hispanic Caucus that whites must step aside and let Hispanics govern, “and if that means that some of us gringos are going to have to give up some life-long dreams, then we’ve got to do that.” When Robert Dornan of California was still in Congress, he welcomed the changing demographics of his Orange County district. “I want to see America stay a nation of immigrants,” he said. “And if we lose our Northern European stock—your coloring and mine, blue eyes and fair hair—tough!” Frank Rich, columnist for the New York Times, appears happy to become a minority. He wrote this about Sonya Sotomayor’s Senate confirmation hearings: “[T]his particular wise Latina, with the richness of her experiences, would far more often than not reach a better [judicial] conclusion than the individual white males she faced in that Senate hearing room. Even those viewers who watched the Sotomayor show for only a few minutes could see that her America is our future and theirs is the rapidly receding past.” It is impossible to imagine people of any other race speaking of themselves this way.
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
What we know or think we know about God might not be so certain, no matter how absolutely certain we think we are—no matter how certain we might even think we have the right to be. Yes, sometimes the biblical writers present God’s ways in absolute black and white. But even if you are able to quote chapter and verse, don’t count on these portraits of God to work everywhere and every time. The Bible isn’t a Christian owner’s manual. God remains shrouded in mystery, inaccessible, beyond our mental reach.
Peter Enns (The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our "Correct" Beliefs)
In this portrait of the Indians as Communists ahead of their time, Zinn draws heavily on Gary Nash’s Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America, which Oscar Handlin put alongside Jennings’s as an “atonement book” that “pivoted on the hostility to whites,” with the portrayal of Indian culture varying “with the preference of the author.” As Handlin points out, for Nash the Indians were “California countercultural rebels, defenders of women’s rights, and communist egalitarians—to say nothing of their anticipation of Freudianism.
Mary Grabar (Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America)
Many people use the terms prejudice and racism interchangeably. I do not, and I think it is important to make a distinction. In his book Portraits of White Racism, David Wellman argues convincingly that limiting our understanding of racism to prejudice does not offer a sufficient explanation for the persistence of racism. He defines racism as a “system of advantage based on race.”2 In illustrating this definition, he provides example after example of how Whites defend their racial advantage—access to better schools, housing, jobs—even when they do not embrace overtly prejudicial thinking. Racism cannot be fully explained as an expression of prejudice alone.
Beverly Daniel Tatum (Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?)
Do you ever regret the choices you made?” He asked because a man could love his wife and still be honest. Flint’s answer was to leaf through the sketches and pull out one of a young couple from a bygone era, his evening attire nearly as resplendent as her ball gown—for all the image was in black and white. “The fashion at one point was to have mirrors in ballrooms, the better to serve both light and vanity. At our betrothal ball, I caught a particular glimpse of your mother’s face as we danced, and it has been all the answer any husband should ever need.” The young marchioness gazed at her husband much as the queen had gazed at her king—with love and admiration, but without the worry. Clearly she had found her way into the arms of the one man in all the world who was right for her. Flint picked up the sketch. “I would give up the ability to see any color, the ability to sketch, and several appendages as well to spend my life with your mother.
Grace Burrowes (Lady Jenny's Christmas Portrait (The Duke's Daughters, #5; Windham, #8))
Zorn’s palette but in his self-portrait his palette holds the colors white, ochre, red, and black. A mix of ochre and black produces a green. The black can be mixed with white for a kind of blue. In both cases, the intensity of the green and blue appears more saturated by adjacent colors which trick the eye into perceiving more color than is actually there. This palette teaches great resourcefulness.
Robert Lewis (How to Paint Plein Air: Beginning Plein Air Painting)
It is easier to believe that the world does not change,” Leon Wieseltier observed about anti-Semitism, “than to believe that the world changes slowly.
Thomas Chatterton Williams (Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race)
Working toward opposing conclusions, racists and many anti-racists alike eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while any of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice.
Thomas Chatterton Williams (Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race)
How can I be ? Proud of my struggle, but having nothing to show. Guns , petrol, tires , gas, everything blows Now I am standing on top of Museum building burned into ashes. It Is smoke in the mirrors. Look at our Repercussions. Our legacy, our reputation. Canvas and portraits of arrogance Lies, deception, fractions results of politicians Insurrection results of a failed mission Blood used to paint our image Poor quality in this fotos, because nothing changed. You might think it is the 80’s, because you can see tribalism and racism. A perfect black and white picture. Sound of freedom turned into sound of violence, Ambulance, Police siren , people crying and dying Hunger and poverty used as tourists attraction They say look more poorer, so we can get more donation. I am getting global media coverage, Because I am queuing and walking long distance for food, Not because we are getting killed , abused and treated unfairly. They look at me and say Africa is starving Took my pics , post them on social media. Now they are laughing. Being born with a price tag, that says you not worth it, because your black. Government looted everything from the poor Now the poor are looting the government. It is like a stolen movie. Those who started it all and who are behind it, are not getting their credit and spotlight . If we change looting to colonization , then they would be heroes. Not sure whether to say goodbye or good night Because when you're in Phoenix , this might be your last night. 
De philosopher DJ Kyos
There are several books on Walter Potter---one is called Sweet Death: A Feast With Kittens; another, The Victorian Visionary: Inventor of Kitsch. There are some on carnivals, fairgrounds, prison murals, prison art, and a hefty book with a title in gold, Portraits of Icons: From Alexamenos Graffito to Peter Blake's Sgt. Pepper. There are also books I have seen before, books I used to, until very recently when I lost my suitcase, own. One is a book on the abstract expressionist Bernice Bing; colors from her piece Burney Falls cascade down the spine---deep red, tinged with orange, outlined in black against white, brown and peach like skin. There's a book on the performance artist Senga Nengudi too, and another on the painter Amrita Sher-Gil. I take this last one off the shelf, and it falls open to a middle page, which has a picture of her painting Three Girls on it. I stand there for a moment, looking at the three girls' faces: calm, patiently waiting. They are huddled close together, as though perhaps they are sisters, but I don't think they could be; they look too different. I had a postcard of this painting taped to my wall while I was growing up. It was blank on the other side, but I kept it because I had found it tucked in the wooden frame of one of Dad's paintings. It went missing at some point, but while I had it, I looked at it often and felt that I knew---like really knew, as though I had a sense about these things---that the girls depicted were vampires, and that they were still out there in the world, looking exactly the same as when Sher-Gil painted them in 1935, and that I would one day meet them. The painting, I decided when I was a child, depicted the three girls quietly waiting for three brothers to come out of a house so that they could eat them.
Claire Kohda (Woman, Eating)
Her love of dogs goes back to her childhood growing up watching black and white television. As Oprah remembers, “I grew up in the days of Lassie – the TV show about a boy [Timmy] and his dog. On the episodes when Lassie would go missing, I would actually get on my knees and pray for Lassie’s return. Not until several years ago – while visiting the set of Desperate Housewives and seeing the house where Timmy and Lassie lived, which is the same neighborhood – did it hit me. Lassie was never lost. It was the scriptwriters and producers’ ode to May sweeps. - Oprah Winfrey in the essay A Dog Like Lassie
William Secord (The American Dog at Home: The Dog Portraits of Christine Merrill)
The aesthetics alone are inspiring. New York–based photographer Richard Barnes, best known for his starkly artistic portraits of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s cabin, released a captivating collection of black-and-white images of starling flocks over Rome in 2005. His photos are carefully framed against urban horizons. Some are simply beautiful, others sinister and Hitchcockian, but all are somehow magnetic (more on that later). In a statement accompanying Barnes’s images, author Jonathan Rosen observes, “Part of the fascination of the starlings is the way they seem to be inscribing some sort of language in the air, if only we could read it.
Noah Strycker (The Thing with Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human)
The idea of racial categorization is an old one, but it is not an ancient one. We know that the Roman playwright Terence observed, “I am human, therefore nothing human is alien to me.” And we know that Imperial Rome was a dizzyingly cosmopolitan milieu, men and women speaking all manner of tongues, worshipping all manner of gods, displaying all manner of skin tones moving through it. And yet it’s worth lingering a moment longer on the fact that Terence did not proclaim, as he might have, “I am Roman, therefore nothing Roman is alien to me.” It has become a commonplace to acknowledge the following point, but it bears repeating anyway: the idea of distinct human races, as we understand it today, only stretches back to Enlightenment Europe, which is to say to the eighteenth century. I have stayed in inns in Germany and eaten at taverns in Spain that have been continuously operating longer than this calamitous thought.
Thomas Chatterton Williams (Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race)
The idea of racial categorization is an old one, but it is not an ancient one. We know that the Roman playwright Terence observed, “I am human, therefore nothing human is alien to me.” And we know that Imperial Rome was a dizzyingly cosmopolitan milieu, men and women speaking all manner of tongues, worshipping all manner of gods, displaying all manner of skin tones moving through it. And yet it’s worth lingering a moment longer on the fact that Terence did not proclaim, as he might have, “I am Roman, therefore nothing Roman is alien to me.” It has become a commonplace to acknowledge the following point, but it bears repeating anyway: the idea of distinct human races, as we understand it today, only stretches back to Enlightenment Europe, which is to say to the eighteenth century. I have stayed in inns in Germany and eaten at taverns in Spain that have been continuously operating longer than this calamitous thought. With the publication of Systema Naturae, in 1735, Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist and “father of modern taxonomy,” fatefully split mankind into four color-coded strands, Europaeus albus, Americanus rubescens, Asiaticus fuscus, Africanus niger; later, the German naturalist, “father of anthropology,” and coiner of that confused and confusing term “Caucasian,”# Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, would have us be five, the aforementioned “Caucasian” (white), “Mongolian” (yellow), “Malayan” (brown), “Ethiopian” (black), and “American” (red), though to his credit he deemphasized hierarchical thinking. The divisions have always been somewhat arbitrary and imprecise, and have fluctuated many times since. What these scientists were attempting, however inadequately, was simply to describe the real physical differences that they observed in the world around them.
Thomas Chatterton Williams (Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race)
overloaded horses bent backwards by the chisel of the mason who once sculpted an eternal now on the brow of the wingless archangel, time-deformed cherubim and the false protests, overweight bowels fallen from the barracks of the pink house carved with grey rain unfallen, never creaking, never opening door, with the mouth wide, darkened and extinguished like a burning boat floating in a voiceless sea, bottle of rum down threadbare socks, singing from pavement to pavement, bright iridescent flame, "Oh, my Annie, my heart is sore!", slept chin on the curb of the last star, the lintel illuminated the forgotten light cast to a different plane, ah the wick of a celestial candle. The piling up of pigeons, tram lines, the pickpocket boys, the melancholy silver, an ode to Plotinus, the rattle of cattle, the goat in the woods, and the retreat night in the railroad houses, the ghosts of terraces, the wine shakes, the broken pencils, the drunk and wet rags, the eucalyptus and the sky. Impossible eyes, wide avenues, shirt sleeves, time receded, 'now close your eyes, this will not hurt a bit', the rose within the rose, dreaming pale under sheets such brilliance, highlighting unreality of a night that never comes. Toothless Cantineros stomp sad lullabies with sad old boots, turning from star to star, following the trail of the line, from dust, to dust, back to dust, out late, wrapped in a white blanket, top of the world, laughs upturned, belly rumbling by the butchers door, kissing the idol, tracing the balconies, long strings of flowers in the shape of a heart, love rolls and folds, from the Window to Window, afflicting seriousness from one too big and ever-charged soul, consolidating everything to nothing, of a song unsung, the sun soundlessly rising, reducing the majesty of heroic hearts and observing the sad night with watery eyes, everything present, abounding, horses frolic on the high hazy hills, a ships sails into the mist, a baby weeps for mother, windows open, lights behind curtains, the supple avenue swoons in the blissful banality, bells ringing for all yet to come forgotten, of bursting beauty bathing in every bright eternal now, counteract the charge, a last turn, what will it be, flowers by the gate, shoe less in the park, burn a hole in the missionary door, by the moonlit table, reading the decree of the Rose to the Resistance, holding the parchment, once a green tree, sticking out of the recital and the solitaire, unbuttoning her coat sitting for a portrait, uncorking a bottle, her eyes like lead, her loose blouse and petticoat, drying out briefs by the stone belfry and her hair in a photo long ago when, black as a night, a muddy river past the weeds, carrying the leaves, her coffee stained photo blowing down the street. Train by train, all goes slow, mist its the morning of lights, it is the day of the Bull, the fiesta of magic, the castanets never stop, the sound between the ringing of the bells, the long and muted silence of the distant sea, gypsy hands full of rosemary, every sweet, deep blue buckets for eyes, dawn comes, the Brahmanic splendour, sunlit gilt crown capped by clouds, brazen, illuminated, bright be dawn, golden avenues, its top to bottom, green to gold, but the sky and the plaza, blood red like the great bleeding out Bull, and if your quiet enough, you can hear the heart weeping.
Samuel J Dixey (The Blooming Yard)
What was the alternative? To go along with the accommodationists, who would integrate at the pace white Birmingham set? To believe that the eloquent Albert Boutwell would be a good mayor and not just a dignified racist? Fred “made Black people uncomfortable,” Walker said, and discomfort was the point of this campaign. Walker had grown up in Merchantville, New Jersey, with a portrait of Frederick Douglass on the wall. What Douglass wrote still resonated with him: “It is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” Damn right. Fred was not the problem. Black Birmingham was the problem. Segregation was the problem. As Walker put it: “See, it was the uncomfortableness that the presence of a Fred Shuttlesworth created. You have to understand how segregation is like a stain and it’s on everybody, and Fred represented the person who had the task of going around trying to wash the stain off.” They would succeed, Walker argued, when Black Birmingham started scrubbing, too.
Paul Kix (You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America)
At the end of the long corridor, he opened another door and we stepped out into a huge kitchen filled with bustling staff who were refilling champagne glasses and making up more of the fancy bite-sized bits of food. Darius skirted the madness and I followed him, careful not to get in anyone’s way. He approached a woman who was working on a tray of creamy puff things and leaned close to ask her something. She instantly stopped what she was doing and headed away with a bow. Darius beckoned for me to follow him and I gritted my teeth as I did, wondering why I’d even come down here with him. The drink was making my head swimmy and apparently it was affecting my judgement too. He led me through a door to a darkened room with a few soft chairs by the far window and a small table in the centre of the space. Darius headed for the chairs but I ignored him, taking a perch on the table instead. “Do you ever do as you’re told?” he asked me, noticing the fact that I’d stopped following him. “Nope. Do you ever stop telling people what to do?” I asked. “I think I might just miss your smart mouth when you fail The Reckoning,” he muttered. I didn’t validate that with a response. He removed his black jacket and I eyed his fitted white shit appreciatively before pulling my gaze away. I did not need to fall under the spell of Darius Acrux’s stupidly hot appearance. Darius tossed his jacket down on the closest chair and moved to stand beside me. I could feel his eyes on me but I gave my attention to the room, studying portraits of old men in stuffy clothes and dragons soaring across the sky. Their choice in decor was boringly repetitive. The door opened and the kitchen maid came in carrying two plates with subs for us. I smiled at her as I accepted mine. “Thanks,” I said and she stared at me like I’d just slapped her before heading out of the room. “What was that about?” I asked before taking a bite of my sandwich. Holy hell that's good. “Serving jobs are generally taken by Fae with negligible amounts of magic,” Darius said as I ate like a woman possessed. “Thanking them for their work is kind of like the sun thanking a daisy for blooming. Just having a position in our household is beyond what they expect in life.” I paused, my food suddenly tasting like soot in my mouth. Of course that was how they viewed people with less than them. They were the elite, top of the pecking order, why would they waste time thanking those beneath them? If we’d met in the mortal world he never would have looked at me at all... and I’d have robbed him blind while he pretended not to notice my existence. I ate the last few bites of my food in silence and put the plate down beside me as soon as I was done. “I’d like to go back to the party now,” I said coldly. Darius eyed me over his own sandwich which he’d barely touched. “Because I don’t thank servants for doing their jobs?” he asked with barely concealed ridicule. “Because you’re boringly predictable just like everyone else here. You’re all more concerned about what everybody else thinks and sees than you are about enjoying life. What difference does it make if someone’s the most powerful Fae in the room or the least? I’d sooner have the time of my life with a powerless nobody than stand about posturing with a guy who doesn’t even know how to have fun.” I shrugged and got to my feet, intending to make my own way back to the ballroom but Darius moved forward a step, boxing me against the table as he placed his sandwich down. (Tory)
Caroline Peckham (Ruthless Fae (Zodiac Academy, #2))
Sir David Evans was a charming old man with philosophic pretensions and a mass of white hair. Because of the philosophy he sat in front of the immense bookcases groaning under Locke, Hartley and Hume; and because of the hair these sages were cased in a dark shiny leather sparsely tooled in gold. The effect was charming – the more so in that Sir David's features invariably suggested rugged benevolence. Every few years a portrait of Sir David robed in scarlet and black and with Locke and Hume behind him would appear in the exhibitions which our greatest painters arrange at Burlington House. Of these portraits one already hung in the Great Hall of the university, a second could be seen in a dominating position as soon as one entered Sir David's villa residence, and a third was stowed away ready for offer to the National Portrait Gallery when the time came.
Michael Innes (The Weight of the Evidence (Inspector Appleby Mystery))
On the walls hung black-and-white portraits of men—it was only in the physics department that you could find the single female face in the whole school, Madame Maria Skłodowska Curie’s, the sole indication of the equality of the sexes. These
Olga Tokarczuk (Flights)
A Roberto Bolaño quote I underlined and copied into a notebook from that time gave the following advice: “Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.” That is exactly what I made it my business to do.
Thomas Chatterton Williams (Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race)
Later, I sat down drunk on the corner of Carondelet and Canal Streets, listening for the rumble of the streetcar that would take me back uptown to my apartment, watching the evening sun bleed from the streets, the city shifting into night, when it truly became New Orleans: the music, the constant festival, the smell of late evening dinners pouring out, layering the beer-soaked streets, prostitutes, clubs with DJs, rowdy gay bars, dirty strip clubs, the insane out for a walk, college students vomiting in trash cans, daiquiri bars lit up like supermarkets, washing-machine-sized mixers built into the wall spinning every color of daiquiri, lone trumpet players, grown women crying, clawing at men in suits, portrait painters, spangers (spare change beggars), gutter punks with dogs, kids tap-dancing with spinning bike wheels on their heads, the golden cowboy frozen on a milk crate, his golden gun pointed at a child in the crowd, fortune-tellers, psycho preachers, mumblers, fighters, rock-faced college boys out for a date rape, club chicks wearing silver miniskirts, horse-drawn carriages, plastic cups piling against the high curbs of Bourbon Street, jazz music pressing up against rock-and-roll cover bands, murderers, scam artists, hippies selling anything, magic shows and people on unicycles, flying cockroaches the size of pocket rockets, rats without fear, men in drag, business execs wandering drunk in packs, deciding not to tell their wives, sluts sucking dick on open balconies, cops on horseback looking down blouses, cars wading across the river of drunks on Bourbon Street, the people screaming at them, pouring drinks on the hood, putting their asses to the window, whole bars of people laughing, shot girls with test tubes of neon-colored booze, bouncers dragging skinny white boys out by their necks, college girls rubbing each other’s backs after vomiting tequila, T-shirts, drinks sold in a green two-foot tube with a small souvenir grenade in the bottom, people stumbling, tripping, falling, laughing on the sidewalk in the filth, laughing too hard to stand back up, thin rivers of piss leaking out from corners, brides with dirty dresses, men in G-strings, mangy dogs, balloon animals, camcorders, twenty-four-hour 3-4-1, free admission, amateur night, black-eyed strippers, drunk bicyclers, clouds of termites like brown mist surrounding streetlamps, ventriloquists, bikers, people sitting on mailboxes, coffee with chicory, soul singers, the shoeless, the drunks, the blissful, the ignorant, the beaten, the assholes, the cheaters, the douche bags, the comedians, the holy, the broken, the affluent, the beggars, the forgotten, and the soft spring air pregnant with every scent created by such a town.
Jacob Tomsky (Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality)
People, especially young white people, in America and in Europe are aware of what's happening in the ghetto even if their fathers maintain an obstinate ignorance. All over Europe I've seen young people who've studied the methods of the Black Liberation movement, applying those same methods to the job of forcing a bit of humanity into their profit-crazed and economically teetering countries. Of course it's got its amusing sides too and very often one is forced to rush somewhere for a drink after he's seen a group of the blond German youths with hair frizzled and worn in Afros. The parents of these kids have all picked the portrait of the President of the United States as a symbol of what was good in America...But I've been in no part of Europe where there wasn't the picture of a good American--and it was always Angela Davis!
Oliver W. Harrington (Why I Left America and Other Essays)
THERE HAVE BEEN FEW ERAS in the history of the United States during which the racial malady of the nation, always lying in wait like Camus’s plague, flared to the proportions
Thomas Chatterton Williams (Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race)
Emmanuel, leafed through a book of photographs, color printouts, bound in black plastic and covered with a thin transparent sheet: There was green grass and a white-paneled house and a little blond girl smiling. There was a large van and an even larger play set. There was a countertop completely covered with food. “This is a very nice place,” Emmanuel said in a quiet voice. “I would like to go to this place.” For Emmanuel, the snapshots of suburban America presented an impossible dream, a portrait of manicured abundance as distant and as glorious as a preacher’s description of heaven.
Stephan Faris (Homelands: The Case for Open Immigration)
We’ve brought you a present, dear.’ ‘Really?’ ‘It’s just for you.’ It’s a hardcover of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and on the inside front page there’s this little oval black and white picture of her with a baby’s bonnet on her head and a kind of ironic smile like She Knows. Jane knows what stupid insensitive people there are in the world and that’s what is behind every word she writes. Look at her portrait, She Knows. I think Dear Jane had a bit of the Impossible Standard herself although maybe it wasn’t even that impossible, maybe it was just some kind of decency and awareness she was expecting. ‘It’s Jane Austen, dear,’ Aunt P says. ‘What?’ Nan asks from the fire. ‘JANE AUSTEN,’ Aunt roars. ‘EXHAUSTING?’ Nan bellows back. ‘YES,’ and starts the Aged P nod. Neither of my aunts, I am convinced, ever drank tea from a mug. The china cups are out for them. They are a pair in the world, the two of them, and trade in exchange one to the other an entire currency of startled, dismayed and disapproving looks. The world fails the Impossible Standard constantly. Sometimes I imagine a whole gallery of their failed suitors, scrubbed jowly farmers of Meath, tweeded-up and cow-licked down, sent up to evenings in Ashcroft. The Meath men have surnames like Castlebridge, Farns, Ainsley. The sisters kill them off afterwards with cutting remarks. One sentence will do for each one.
Niall Williams (History of the Rain)
--Birthday Star Atlas-- "Wildest dream, Miss Emily, Then the coldly dawning suspicion— Always at the loss—come day Large black birds overtaking men who sleep in ditches. A whiff of winter in the air. Sovereign blue, Blue that stands for intellectual clarity Over a street deserted except for a far off dog, A police car, a light at the vanishing point For the children to solve on the blackboard today— Blind children at the school you and I know about. Their gray nightgowns creased by the north wind; Their fingernails bitten from time immemorial. We're in a long line outside a dead letter office. We're dustmice under a conjugal bed carved with exotic fishes and monkeys. We're in a slow drifting coalbarge huddled around the television set Which has a wire coat-hanger for an antenna. A quick view (by satellite) of the polar regions Maternally tucked in for the long night. Then some sort of interference—parallel lines Like the ivory-boned needles of your grandmother knitting our fates together. All things ambigious and lovely in their ambiguity, Like the nebulae in my new star atlas— Pale ovals where the ancestral portraits have been taken down. The gods with their goatees and their faint smiles In company of their bombshell spouses, Naked and statuesque as if entering a death camp. They smile, too, stroke the Triton wrapped around the mantle clock When they are not showing the whites of their eyes in theatrical ecstasy. Nostalgias for the theological vaudeville. A false springtime cleverly painted on cardboard For the couple in the last row to sigh over While holding hands which unknown to them Flutter like bird-shaped scissors . . . Emily, the birthday atlas! I kept turning its pages awed And delighted by the size of the unimaginable; The great nowhere, the everlasting nothing— Pure and serene doggedness For the hell of it—and love, Our nightly stroll the color of silence and time.
Charles Simic (Unending Blues)
What are you doing?” “Taking you for a ride.” As she sputtered with questions, he touched a gentle forefinger to her lips. “Trust me,” he whispered. Amelia complied in a daze as he pulled her from the bed, wrapped the velvet robe around her, and tucked her feet into soft slippers. Clasping her hand firmly in his, Cam led her from the room. The house was still and soundless, the walls hung with portraits of aristocrats with disapproving faces. They went out the back of the house to the great stone terrace, its wide curving steps leading down to the gardens. The moonlight was crossed with shredded clouds that glowed against a sky the color of black plums. Puzzled but willing, Amelia went with Cam to the bottom of the steps. He stopped and gave a short whistle. “What—” Amelia gasped as she heard the pounding of heavy hooves and saw a huge black form rushing toward them like something from a nightmare. Alarm darted through her, and she burrowed against Cam, her face hidden against his chest. His arm went around her, tucking her close. When the thundering stopped, Amelia risked a glance at the apparition. It was a horse. A huge black horse, with puffing breaths that rose like wraiths in the raw air. “Is this really happening?” she asked. Cam reached in his pocket and fed the horse a sugar lump, and ran his hand over the sleek midnight neck. “Have you ever had a dream like this?” “Never.” “Then it must be happening.” “You actually have a horse who comes when you whistle?” “Yes, I trained him.” “What is his name?” His smile gleamed white in the darkness. “Can’t you guess?” Amelia thought for a moment. “Pooka?” The horse turned his head to look at her as if he understood. “Pooka,” she repeated with a faint smile. “Do you have wings, by any chance?” At Cam’s subtle gesture, the horse shook his head in an emphatic no, and Amelia laughed shakily. Walking to Pooka’s side, Cam swung up onto the packsaddle in a graceful movement. He sidled close to the step on which Amelia was standing and reached down to her. She took his hand, managing to gain a foothold on the stirrup. She was lifted easily onto the saddle in front of him. Momentum carried her a little too far, but Cam’s arm locked around her, keeping her in place. Amelia leaned back into the hard cradle of his chest and arm. Her nostrils were filled with the scents of autumn, damp earth, horse and man and midnight. “You knew I’d come with you, didn’t you?” she asked. Cam leaned over her, kissing her temple. “I only hoped.” His thighs tightened, setting the horse to a gallop, and then a smooth canter. And when Amelia closed her eyes, she could have sworn they were flying.
Lisa Kleypas (Mine Till Midnight (The Hathaways, #1))
Portrait of the Author" The birches are mad with green points the wood's edge is burning with their green, burning, seething—No, no, no. The birches are opening their leaves one by one. Their delicate leaves unfold cold and separate, one by one. Slender tassels hang swaying from the delicate branch tips— Oh, I cannot say it. There is no word. Black is split at once into flowers. In every bog and ditch, flares of small fire, white flowers!—Agh, the birches are mad, mad with their green. The world is gone, torn into shreds with this blessing. What have I left undone that I should have undertaken? O my brother, you redfaced, living man ignorant, stupid whose feet are upon this same dirt that I touch—and eat. We are alone in this terror, alone, face to face on this road, you and I, wrapped by this flame! Let the polished plows stay idle, their gloss already on the black soil. But that face of yours—! Answer me. I will clutch you. I will hug you, grip you. I will poke my face into your face and force you to see me. Take me in your arms, tell me the commonest thing that is in your mind to say, say anything. I will understand you—! It is the madness of the birch leaves opening cold, one by one. My rooms will receive me. But my rooms are no longer sweet spaces where comfort is ready to wait on me with its crumbs. A darkness has brushed them. The mass of yellow tulips in the bowl is shrunken. Every familiar object is changed and dwarfed. I am shaken, broken against a might that splits comfort, blows apart my careful partitions, crushes my house and leaves me—with shrinking heart and startled, empty eyes—peering out into a cold world. In the spring I would be drunk! In the spring I would be drunk and lie forgetting all things. Your face! Give me your face, Yang Kue Fei! your hands, your lips to drink! Give me your wrists to drink— I drag you, I am drowned in you, you overwhelm me! Drink! Save me! The shad bush is in the edge of the clearing. The yards in a fury of lilac blossoms are driving me mad with terror. Drink and lie forgetting the world. And coldly the birch leaves are opening one by one. Coldly I observe them and wait for the end. And it ends.
William Carlos Williams (Sour Grapes)
I’m giving you the opportunity to be involved in a very high-quality private catering event. Isn’t that something you’re supposed to be training for?’ Nathan hissed. ‘I don’t care what Maude may or may not feel. This is business.’ The door was opened by an attractive middle-aged woman wearing a crisp grey pencil skirt, forest-green blouse and black stilettos, standing in the doorway. ‘Ah, Mr DaCosta? The catering? Perfect timing.’ Lila suddenly felt dowdy in her catering whites. ‘And your colleague? Welcome. I’m Sarah, the housekeeper; I’ll show you where to set up.’ They followed Sarah into the house, her high heels clicking on a perfect white marble floor. Lila wondered if she ever lost her balance on such a slippery surface, especially in those heels. A housekeeper wearing what looked suspiciously like Louboutins wasn’t quite what Lila had expected. She was cross with Nathan and wished she’d never come, even though the extra money was useful. Still, she thought to herself, she was here now, and Nathan was her boss. So she was stuck here. ‘Just checking it’s a party of twenty?’ Nathan asked her as they traversed the long hall, hung with old-fashioned oil portraits intermixed with modern paintings. Just that wall of art would probably pay for my flat, Lila thought, admiring
Kennedy Kerr (Secrets of Magpie Cove (Magpie Cove, #2))