Bad and cruel as our people were treated by the whites, not one of them was hurt or molested by our band. (...) The whites were complaining at the same time that we were intruding upon their rights. They made it appear that they were the injured part...
At the age of twelve, before I had had one full year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and min...
Basically, love and hate activate similar circuits in the brain, but hate also activates the circuits used for rational thought. Which means, when you hate my adorable lips, you're thinking quite clearly, unlike when you think of how I love you and y...
What is it about humans that make us so prone to prejudice?” Blue arches one of his unnaturally colored eyebrows and looks up to meet my gaze. “If we didn’t form prejudices, we wouldn’t be learning from our environment, you dolt. It’s an an...
She liked me because she said that we both hated everything and knew that friendship was an act of desperation. She said that for a man I was alright. She said that people were half-way and if it was up to her a lot of people would get killed and a l...
Oh come ,'Pheobe continued. 'You're asking for it. Pale skin, black clothes, no lunch and that whole brooding thing? It's hilarious. You should get body glitter and go after an unsuspecting freshman.' 'You should!' Cassidy agreed. 'Tell her you're a ...
The word “idiot” comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the mal...
Every mother can easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat with, scold and kiss, their current corporeal forms. ...
People're always buried facing west, so at the end of time when the Last Trumpet blows, all the dead people'll claw their way up and walk due west to the throne of Jesus to be judged. . . . Suicides, mind, get buried facing north. They won't be able ...
Deal with all this, live with myself, you mean? I honestly don't know. I stand often enough at the abyss of my soul, asking that same question, looking down into the dark crevices where the black monsters dwell on the bottom. They gaze up at me, and ...
Girls love each other like animals. There is something ferocious and unself-conscious about it. We don't guard ourselves like we do with boys. No one trains us to shield our hearts from each other. With girls, it's total vulnerability from the beginn...
I am not the heroine of this story. And I'm not trying to be cute. It's the truth. I'm diagnosed borderline and seriously fucked-up. I hold grudges. I bottle my hate until it ferments into poison, and then I get high off the fumes. I'm completely dys...
What about-you?" I kept my voice carefully indifferent. He flashed me a cold smile, sharp at the edges. "Worried about me?" Because I couldn't think of anything snide to say, I stuck my tongue out at him. Jude wagged his head. "More tongue exercises?...
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, un...
Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene th...
You know," he added reflectively, "we've got a much easier job now than we should have had fifty years ago. If we'd had to modernise a country then it would have meant constitutional monarchy, bicameral legislature, proportional representation, women...
Then the coxswain called out, 'Ready all!' Joe turned and faced the rear of the boat, slid his seat forward, sank the white blade of his oar into the oil-black water, tensed his muscles, and waited for the command that would propel him forward into t...
But now that I can see it all as from a lonely hilltop, I know it was the story of a mighty vision given to a man too weak to use it; of a holy tree that should have flourished in a people’s heart with flowers and singing birds, and now is withered...
Tomorrow you may bring about the destruction of your world. Tomorrow you may sing in Paradise above the smoking ruins of your world-cities. But tonight I would like to think of one man, a lone individual, a man without name or country, a man whom I r...
She said it out loud, the words distributed into a room that was full of cold air and books. Books everywhere! Each wall was armed with overcrowded yet immaculate shelving. It was barely possible to see paintwork. There were all different styles and ...
A SMALL PIECE OF TRUTH I do not carry a sickle or scythe. I only wear a hooded black robe when it's cold. And I don't have those skull-like facial features you seem to enjoy pinning on me from a distance. You want to know what I truly look like? I'll...
