Loving is a journey with water and with stars, With smotherred air and abrupt storms of flour: Loving is a clash of lightning-bolts, And two bodies defeated by a single drop of honey.
Trying to grow up is hurting, you know. You make mistakes. You try to learn from them, and when you don't, it hurts even more. And I've been hurt - hurt bad. I might be twenty-six, but I'm an old woman in disguise - twenty-six goin' on sixty-five.
The paths to knowledge inevitably veer through dangerous territory. Those paths wind through the land of misunderstanding, sometimes shrouded in that deceptive fog of the assumed, the unknown, and the misinformed. Weaponry of any kind is futile and self-defeating. Better to travel with an open mind and it's twin, an open heart.
An open mind will be nourished by others seeking knowledge, by mistakes, challenges, and misadventure. A closed mind neither seeks or needs nourishment, because it is never hungry. An open heart beats but is never beaten. - author FireFly
As a subject for research, the possibility of an African discovery of American has never been a tempting one for American historians. In a sense, we choose our own history, or more accurately, we select those vistas of history for our examinations which promise us the greatest satisfaction, and we have had little appetite to explore the possiblity that our found father was a black man. - Samuel D. Marble
By idolizing those whom we honour, we do a disservice both to them and to ourselves.... We fail to recognize that we could go and do likewise. - Charles V. Willie
Funny how this sounds as appropriate now, as it did back in 1941...
"I contend that the Negro is the creative voice of America, is creative America, and it was a happy day in America when the first unhappy slave was landed on its shores. There, in our tortured induction into "this land of liberty," we built its most graceful civilization. Its wealth, its flowering fields, its handsome homes, its pretty traditions, its guarded leisure, and its music were all our creations...
It is our voice that sang "America" when America grew too lazy, satisfied and confident to sing, before the dark threats and fire-lined clouds of destruction frightened it into a thin, panicky quaver.
We are more than a few isolated instances of courage, valor, achievment. We're the injection, the shot in the arm that has kept America and its gotten principles alive in the fat and corrupt years intervening between our divine conception and our near-tragic present."
Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.
