Scottie None’s Reviews > The Fire Next Time > Status Update

"Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality."

"I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand--and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and American Negro history in particular, for it testifies nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible."

"I suddenly had a glimpse of what white people must go through...when they are trying to prove that negroes are not subhuman. I had almost said, after all, 'Well. take my friend Mary,' and very nearly descended into a catalogue of those virtues that gave Mary the right to be alive. And in what hope? That Elijah and the others would nod their heads solemnly and say, at least, 'Well, she's all right--but the others!'"

"Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue."

"...a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless."

"The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass, and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can."

"To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does..."