“She envied Ralph his dying, for if one were thinking of rest that was the most perfect of all. To cease utterly, to give it all up and not know anything more — this idea was as sweet as the vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land.”
Quote collection
Thinking Quotes — page 969 of 4756
“The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks. She spent half her time in thinking of beauty, bravery, magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action, she thought it would be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. She had an infinite hope that she would never do anything wrong. She had resented so strongly, after discovering them, her mere errors of feeling.”
“To live only to suffer—only to feel the injury of life repeated and enlarged—it seemed to her she was too valuable, too capable, for that. Then she wondered if it were vain and stupid to think so well of herself. When had it even been a guarantee to be valuable? Wasn't all history full of the destruction of precious things? Wasn't it much more probable that if one were fine one would suffer?”
“Which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?”
“Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.”
“We can't all work in the inner city. And, I don't even think that it is incumbent upon an African-American intellectual to be concerned in their work with problems of race and class. It's just one of the things, that we here at the DuBois Institute, are concerned about.”
“A more humane form of capitalism is about the best I think we can get. Which might sound very reformist or conservative, but that's basically where I am.”
“I think that we need more economic-based solutions to the problems afflicting the Black community, and I think that that's a way to redefine affirmative action. I grew up with poor white people in West Virginia, and I know there's a culture of poverty. I know that I've seen white people perform exactly the same pathological forms of behavior as Black people do when they're systematically deprived, whether it's getting pregnant, doing drugs, dropping out of school, whatever we're talking about. I think that we should have affirmative action for poor white people too.”
“The thing about living in a village at the foot of a mountain is that the world for you becomes, without thinking about it, self-contained. People are of two kinds, really: from the Valley, and from Elsewhere.”
“I'm a tech geek. Whenever I read about something new, I think to myself, How can I take this and make it black?”
“It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that.”
“Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time.”
“You should not pick an occupation because your think your parents want you to do it, or because you think it's the noble thing to do. You should only pick a job because it turns you on.”
“My producers and I worked with these consultants and came up with seventy [stories] which we think are exemplary of the larger arc of African-American history between 1513 and 2013. We covered half a millennium, and it's amazing.”
“My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves.”
“Ending the slave trade was contrary to British economic interests. For all its limitations and hypocrisies - British slavery itself, of course, still continued to exist - I still think it was a great moment in human history.”
“I use African-American, because I teach African Studies as well as African-American Studies, so it's easy, neat and convenient. But sometimes, when you're in a barber shop, somebody'll say, "Did you see what that Negro did?" A lot of people slip in and out of different terms effortlessly, and I don't think the thought police should be on patrol.”
“If you want to have the right to have that conversation with your agent - "I know you sent it to me, I know you like it, but I just really think it's terrible" - you need to have the full details about script. You don't want to be in that situation where your agent says, "What about after the first 20 pages where it turns into a psychedelic musical?" And you're like "What? I thought it was an action-rom!"”
“My first professional audition - god, I've never told anybody about this - was for a test commercial, I think it was for Xbox. It involved me getting kidnapped by a granny who wanted to play the Xbox. It was very weird and I definitely had no idea what I was doing. I actually got the gig. It wasn't a commercial; it was what directors did when they wanted to show the company what they would do with a commercial.”
“I think you have moments of doubt and moments where it feels really hard. You certainly have to be patient, and I'm a very impatient person. It's been like when Yoda teaches Luke to be a Jedi; the things that I do professionally have taught me new levels of patience.”