Thomas Chatterton Quotes

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.

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.

Bitter criticism caused the sensitive Thomas Hardy, one of the finest novelists ever to enrich English literature, to give up forever the writing of fiction. Criticism drove Thomas Chatterton, the English poet, to suicide.

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.

Faygne woulde I curse thee further, botte mie tyngue Denies mie harte the favoure soe toe doe.

For Hegel, it is actually the slave who comes out on top in the long run. In that initial life-and-death struggle, which sets the terms going forward, one “I” experiences what Hegel calls the “fear of death” and submits to the other. This “I” decides he “loves life” and concedes the fight. And this initially submissive consciousness, the slave consciousness, on pain of death, now serves the other’s will and works for him. But it is through this very work that, eventually, he will come to surpass his master, Hegel reasons. On a basic level, this is so because it is the slave who masters objective reality, or nature. The slave takes the plants and animals and transforms them, through work, into meals; the slave transforms, with his hands, a tree into a table; the slave is most alive, becomes necessary, develops his spirit. The master, on the other hand, is parasitic, decadent, dependent. Without the slave’s recognition, he is not even a master; without the slave’s work, he cannot prosper.

when I bought and read a copy of The Brothers Karamazov (a very serious book of which I am not sure what Oscar Wilde would have thought). According to Borges, there is a special Islamic night, called the Night of Nights, in which the hidden doors to heaven are cast open wide and “the water in the water jars is sweeter than on other nights.” It was something like this that I felt when I encountered Dostoyevsky for the first time.

Everyone in the room—all Franco-French white kids, it occurred to me—knew their Louis Armstrong inside and out, knew the names of the songs, had their favorites. That is phenomenal, I thought. “How do you guys know so much about black music?” I asked. “Are you kidding?” Stéphane, replied, assuming, I think, that I was implying only an American could be so well versed. “This is something the whole world knows. Practically everything except classical is black music!” I refilled my glass with the brandy, which, I noticed, tasted an awful lot like Hennessy—better, though.

I was haunted by one especially poetic sentence in Heidegger: “Overnight . . . Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something to be manipulated. . . . Every secret loses its force.” The more the individual feels a need to keep it real, the more he is pushed toward “averageness” and a “leveling down” of all possibilities and varieties of being. The They separates the individual from himself. For Heidegger and Steele, the stifling of individual freedom by the collective will of the group poses a grave existential threat in itself. It is not a threat that is restricted to the black community by any means. Quite the opposite, it is characteristic of all communities and herds.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

If it is true that it feels good to look good, then it is equally true that it can feel gangsta to look gangsta and it can feel thugged-out to look thugged-out, or, on the other hand, it can feel smart to look smart. I wanted to feel smart.

The idea struck me as either insane or a joke. And yet, the more I thought about it—that those who have been subjugated might actually over time be able to gain something from that subjugation—the more I struggled with this idea from my comfortable swivel chair, armed with the space and perspective I was fortunate enough to have been granted, the more I found it difficult to dismiss as simply false.

Men would prefer anything rather than be free