Always take all the time to reflect that circumstances permit, but when the time for action has come, stop thinking. (Andrew Jackson)
It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.
Dream Song: As my eyes Search the prairie, I feel the summer in the spring. Whenever I pause The noise Of the village.
Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I'm Jamaican or I'm Ghanaian. America doesn't care.
I was ambitious and desperate to direct my first film, so I capitulated and blew it. Never again. Never fucking again.
You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.
Acid gave me a clinical, unblinking look at madness, and I discovered I wasn't brave enough to be insane.
I found out it is just as hard to make a movie that you are not proud of as it is to make one you love.
This is laid down with a groove funkier and blacker than anything Prince of Michael Jackson--or any other black artist of the recent years for that matter--has come up with.
After a day and a half or so the traveler will realize that crossing the continent by Interstate he gets to know the country about as well as a cable messenger knows the sea bottom.
I'd put him in the spot where he got hit. It was my fault he got shot. A hundred kills? Two hundred? More? What did they mean if my brother was dead?
But real life doesn't travel in a perfect straight line; it doesn't necessarily have that 'all lived happily ever after' bit. You have to work on where you're going.
Parker didn’t so much melt against him as he tried to inhabit the same skin Jake was wearing, and Jake wasn’t going to complain about that.
Americans of faith should try as hard to save the lives of African women as the lives of unborn fetuses.
Modern American culture dictated the importance of touching the hand of someone you’ve just met, however counterintuitive it seemed. Why would he want to touch someone he didn’t know?
Driving is boring," Rabbit pontificates, "but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.
Before you leave here, Sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.
We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.
Webster said, ''Time them skeeters get done with that old man, his French blood will be all gone and he will speak American as good as we do.
