More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
But the mind is its own place, as Milton said, it can make a Hell of Heaven and a Heaven of Hell.
met a traveller from an antique land, Who said ‒ “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand Half sunk, a shattered visage lies . .
“Ozymandias”
scratched her name on every page.
The worst thing isn’t that it strips the world to scraps and forces you to fight for them; the worst thing is that one of those scraps is yourself.
A man writes to separate himself from the common history. A woman writes to try to join it.
Only two types of white people in this world, chile, the ones doing shit to you and the ones wanting you to tell them ’bout the shit them other ones did.
price of an education is different depending on who you are.’
‘I learned whatever would be useful to Langton, sir, whereas I’m sure the object of educating a schoolboy is to teach him something that would be useful to him.’
Wollstonecraft said that a woman will be crucified for aiming at respect instead of love, she must have meant at the hands of the very man who is supposed to love her
Good intentions should never attach themselves to bad means.
What would you do, sitting in a dark, locked room, if someone brought in a lighted candle?
‘Though I think the point of reading is not to feel more a part of the world, but less. To take oneself out of it. On paper, everything can be hammered into shape, though the world is shapeless.’ She
I was a woman who loved a woman, chief among the womanly sins, like barrenness and thinking.
Why is it that every white you’ll ever meet either wants to tame you or rescue you?
What no one will admit about the anti-slavers is that they’ve all got a slaver’s appetite for misery, even if they want to do different things with it. And, for all their talk of men as brothers, most of them stared at me as if I had two heads.
she didn’t die a poet, she died a maid.
‘No man can be as clever as the world thinks he is,’
Life is a brief candle but love is a craving for time.
But only a man would think splitting a baby in two was a solution rather than a problem, just like only a white man would consider slavery a difficult question.
Women focus on what they lack, men on what they want. In all those Bible stories, it’s always the women who look back, who eat the forbidden fruit, who weep over hollow wombs, and fruitful ones. Yearning is always a woman’s sin. The men never turn around, nor ever think twice about taking a knife – or a cross – to their own longed-for sons.
His object: not to abolish, but to preserve.
‘There’s no reforming what’s already rotten.’
Though pious is hardly ever useful.
‘Isn’t that what the European himself has told us? That the European’s pleasure is the African’s pleasure? Aren’t we supposed to take the European’s word for it? Because who would ever dream of asking the African what he wants? It’s the European who marches across this little globe, measuring everything, writing it down. Adam. God of all creatures, great and small.’
Because you look at a single black man and see all black men. As if one black man is a representative of every other member of his race. Allowed neither personality nor passion. Not allowed to love anybody, or anything.
‘Most whites will be impressed with anything that comes out of a black’s mouth, Miss Elliot, if it’s dressed up in plain English. One can never know if one is being praised for being good, or simply for being good enough.’
Blacks will write only about suffering, and only for white people, as if our purpose here is to change their minds.
But melancholia is not the leap, it is the desire. The constant irrepressible agonizing urge.
Design a benevolent framework for the institution.
Wow. Yes, he’s talking about slavery, but I keep applying his ideas of reforming a rotten system to modern systems like policing, schools, etc.
I’ll have put them off me, as so often happens when you speak the truth. It’s the reason so many do not.
The rest is only drawn out to make a show for them.
And the jurors, the judge, all of you, are men, made loose by balls and bragging, with no earthly notion how tight it can get inside a woman’s skin.
white women never take the blame.
But would you have understood? I knew I had to tell you my story first.
