Jeff

“To be there in that stinking cell on a dirty cot with a poor, baldheaded, hairy-handed goat, you couldn't chalk that off to atmosphere.”
― Elliott Chaze, Black Wings Has My Angel

“But if you believe God's divine judgment and you countenance reincarnation, then it may be reasonably assumed that a certain bacterium living in the anus of a particularly ancient hatchetfish at the bottom of the ocean is the recycled and fully sentient soul of Adolf Hitler glimmering miserably through the cloacal muck in which he is periodically bathed and nourished.”
― E.L. Doctorow

“But that’s the thing. You can play one part in life, but you can’t be that thing. You just playing it. You’re not real. I was a Negro above all else, and Negroes plays their part, too: Hiding. Smiling. Pretending bondage is okay till they’re free, and then what? Free to do what? To be like the white man? Is he so right? Not according to the Old Man. It occurred to me then that you is everything you are in this life at every moment. And that includes loving somebody. If you can’t be your own self, how can you love somebody? How can you be free? That pressed on my heart like a vice right then. Just mashed me down.”
― James McBride, The Good Lord Bird

“But if you could not close a door behind you to take a shit in the city--even if it was just the door to a shared toilet--if this one, most essential freedom was taken from you, the freedom, that is, to withdraw from other people when necessity called, then all other freedoms were worthless. Then life had no more meaning. Then it would be better to be dead.”
― Patrick Süskind, The Pigeon