Cloudsplitter Quotes

“If you yourself are not a victim, you cannot claim to see the world as the victim does.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“Of all the animals on this planet, we are surely the nastiest, the most deceitful, the most murderous and vile. Despite our God, or because of him. Both.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“You must not obey a majority, no matter how large, if it opposes your principles and opinions.' He said this to each new volunteer and repeated it over and over to him, until it was engraved on his mind. 'The largest majority is often only an organized mob whose noise can no more change the false into the true than it can change black into white or night into day. And a minority, conscious of its rights, if those rights are based on moral principles, will sooner or later become a just majority.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“Poor, deluded fools. Because their skin's as white as the rich man's, they believe that they might someday be rich themselves. But without the Negro, Owen, these men would be forced to see that, in fact, they have no more chance of becoming rich than do the very slaves they despise and trample on. They'd see how close they are to being slaves themselves. Thus, to protect and nurture their dream of becoming someday, somehow, rich, they don't need actually to own slaves, so much as they need to keep the Negro from ever being free.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“It was like a dream, a beautiful, soothing dream of late autumn: low, gray skies, smell of woodsmoke, fallen leaves crackling beneath my feet, and somewhere out there, in the farmsteads and plantations ahead of me, swift retribution! Freedom! The bloody work of the Lord!”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“Father argued that society as a whole must come to be organized on a different basis than greed, for while material interests gained somewhat by the institutionalized deification of pure selfishness, ordinary men and women lost everything by it.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“I was situated at that moment in the turning of the northern year, when the end of winter and the start of spring overlap like shingles on a roof and the natural world seems doubled in thickness and density. A slight shift in the direction of the wind cools the air a single degree, and suddenly a puddle of standing water is covered with a skin of ice that, seconds later, as the wind parts the clouds and opens the sky, melts in the sunlight. At this moment, all is change. Transformation seems permanent. I was trembling with a type of excitement that I had never felt before, a powerful mixture of anticipation and regret, as if I somehow knew that eternal gain and irretrievable loss were about to be parceled out equally—as if the idea of justice were about to be made a material thing.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“Let the soil here below stink and turn to a scarlet muck, and let us crawl through it until our mouths and nostrils fill with it and we drown in it with our hands on each other’s throats—I no longer resist this war. I relish it.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“Father took race to be the central and inescapable fact of American life and character, and thus he did not apologize for its being the central fact of his own life and character.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“We pass between sea and sky with unaccountable, humiliating ease, as if there were no firmament between the firmaments, no above or below, here or there, now or then, with only the feeble conventions of language, our contrived principles, and our love of one another's light to keep our own light from going out; abandon any one of them, and we dissolve in darkness like salt in water.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“In some countries, I said to myself, the only life you can properly desire is that of destroyer.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“I write now only so that I can someday cease to write. I speak in order to go silent. And I listen to my voice so that I will soon no longer be obliged to hear it.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“To Father, white and black Americans alike were bound by slavery: the physical condition of the enslaved, he insisted, was the moral condition of the free. This was not some vague, safely abstract principle, such as propounded by the New England philosophers. No, for Father, quite literally, we Americans, white as much as black, Northern as much as Southern, anti-slave as much as pro-, we were, all of us, presently living under the rule of Satan.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“Those who stayed on and endured our hardship and deprivation and the almost daily risk to our lives were of necessity physically hardy fellows, but they were also the most courageous men out there then and the most dedicated to the anti-slavery cause. Father would have said it was because they were dedicated to the anti-slavery cause. 'It's a mistake,' he told me, 'to that that bullies make the best fighters, or that violent, cruel men would be fitter to oppose the Southerners than our mild, abolitionist Christians. Give me men of good principles, God-fearing men, men who respect themselves and each other, and with a dozen of them I'll oppose any hundred of such men as these Border Ruffians!”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“If we had learned anything over the last decade, it was that there was no other way to defeat slavery, except with a willingness to die for it. We had learned what the Negroes long knew. And thus we merely did what the Negroes themselves had done over and over in the past—in Haiti, in the mountains of Jamaica, and in the swamps of Virginia—but could not do out there on the plains of Kansas. We did what we wanted the Negroes to do in Kansas. By slaying those five pro-slavers on the Pottawatomie that night, we placed hundreds, thousands, of other white men in the same position that we along amongst the whites had held for years: for now every white man in Kansas, anti-slaver and pro-slaver alike, had to be ready to die for his cause.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act at once lit up the Northern sky like sheets of lightning and electrified thousands of white men and women who up to now had regarded themselves as moderate abolitionists. And suddenly our anger, our consuming rage, did not seem so odd anymore. Which was strange to me, for I had grown used tour family's being both charged by its anger, as if it were our responsibility, and isolated by it as if it were our curse. Now that rage was the norm, however, ours seemed to have been oddly premature and, in this new context, somehow inappropriate and useless. At least to me it did.

Father simply declared that it proved we had been right all along. But we had spent so much time and energy for so many years, all the years of my life, justifying in moral, legal, and Biblical terms the ferocity of our position, that we had not stepped away from it and considered its deeper and more personal sources. We had not even considered whether it had such sources. What was abnormal to others had long seemed normal to us—until, thanks to the Fugitive Law, everyone else turned out as alarmed and angry as we and as determined as we to commit acts pf violence in order to deter the further extension of slavery. Earlier, our alarm and anger and commitment had seemed as evidence of our election, as it were, proof of our moral superiority. Now, however, we were no longer positioned amongst our people like prophets, for every decent person in the North was finally awake to the emergency. Or so it briefly seemed. And during this period, instead of feeling at one with my neighbors and grateful for that, I began to wonder why had we seen so early the horrors of slavery, when practically everyone else was blind to it, and why we had been so ferocious, when nearly every other well-intended Northern white man and woman had merely been concerned or, at best, disgusted.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“I suppose some things seem obscure, Mister Brown, but really, they're quite obvious, aren't they?' said Mr. Forbes. 'Once they've been pointed out, of course. Either by genius before the fact, or, as is more often the case, after the fact by disaster. Don't you think so?...For instance, Mr. Brown, here's some after-the-fact wisdom, if you like. Taken from the Italian campaign. Taught by disaster.' The smaller force, he said, had of necessity always to be made of men who, though they believed many things, must believe but two. Number one, each soldier must believe that he is engaged in a struggle in which he and his comrades are morally right and their opposition is morally wrong. No middle way. No room to negotiate a compromise. It couldn't be a simple dispute over land. Basic principles, not mere borders, must be at stake. And number two, he must believe that he is fighting for his own life and for the lives of his loved ones. So that the only imaginable alternative to his participating in this dreadful war is death for him and his loved ones. No going home for a season to harvest the olives and the grapes.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“Her family members and their friends and associates were, for the most part, rigorous Unitarians and well-known Transcendentalists. But for all their liberalism in religion, in terms of their public and private behavior they were still old-fashioned, upright Puritans. 'In other words, they are good people,' she said. 'Morally upright.' Their generation had abandoned the Calvinist theology in their youth, but had kept the morality. She, on the other hand, having been encouraged by her elders since her nursery days to forsake the old Puritan forms of religion, had retained none of the Puritans' moral uprightness and rigor. She was a sinner, she said. A sinner without the comfort of prayer and with no possibility of redemption.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“Every morning, before beginning our day's labor, we gathered together in the parlor for prayers and Father's brief sermon, and even though I had grown long used to these solemn services, they nevertheless uplifted me, as I believe they did the others, and made the day's work easier, for despite my unbelief, the services connected our labor to something larger than ourselves and our petty daily needs. Father's intention, I am sure, was precisely that–to lead us to understand our woodcutting and plowing and constant care of animals, the day-long manufacture of our meals and the permanent ongoing repair of our tools and equipment, and our endless preparation for the long winter, such that we would believe that we were participating in a great cycle of life, as if we were tiny arcs of an enormous curve, a universal template that began with birth and ended with death and which, if participated in fully and without shirking, would lead us to a second and still larger cycle of rebirth and regeneration, to an infinite spiral, as it were. Thus, as the fields were prepared and sown, so too were our inner lives being prepared and sown, and as our land and our livestock grew fruitful and multiplied, so did our spirits blossom and bear fruit, and as we dried and salted and stored our food and supplies in sawdust and hay for winter, so would our spirits and minds be prepared to endure the inescapable suffering and deaths of our loved ones, which would come to us as inevitably as the freezing winds and the deep, drifting snows of winter.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“But so much of a man's life is merely a matter of choice, the declared—the right choice, the wrong choice. And even if a man makes the wrong choice, he can still change it. He simply has to change his mind. "You're a man, Owen, aren't you? And, really, when you have good health, you men are your minds. You can become a man of action, if you want. Or of religion. Or both. You may not end up famous for it, like your beloved father, but you can be it. Tell me Owen, isn't that how it is?" She stared grimly down at the black waves and clenched the rail with both hands.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“was waiting, silently waiting, not so much for my actual death, which meant little to me, one way or the other, as for the pine box that contained my bones to be carried three thousand miles from the hills of California back along the railroad lines to my family’s house and farm in the Adirondack mountain village of North Elba, New York. To the place that, because of the Negroes living there, we called Timbuctoo. A letter from a distinguished woman in the East who had long”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“it is when a white person resists the privilege of turning colorless that he frees himself, at least partially from the sickness of racialism.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“Thus, until we have truly become a democracy, every American, white as much as black, red, or yellow, lives not in his skin but on it. If one person is called "colored", let all be colored.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“By this evening,” he declared, “we will all know who we are and what we’re doing here!”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“John had once said to me, in a complaining tone, that Father had taught us to be afraid of no man except him. And it was true. Father always insisted that we think for ourselves in every way, except when we disagreed with him, and that we hold ourselves independent of every man’s will, except his. He wanted us simultaneously to be independent and yet to serve him. Father was to be our Abraham; we were to be his little Isaacs. We were supposed to know ahead of time, however, the happy outcome of the story—we were supposed to know that it was a story, not about us and our willingness to lie on a rock on Mount Moriah and be sacrificed under his knife, but about our father and his willingness to obey his terrible God.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter