“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, quote from Cloudsplitter
“If you yourself are not a victim, you cannot claim to see the world as the victim does.”
― Russell Banks, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Cloudsplitter
“In some countries, I said to myself, the only life you can properly desire is that of destroyer.”
― Russell Banks, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Cloudsplitter
“By this evening,” he declared, “we will all know who we are and what we’re doing here!”
― Russell Banks, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Cloudsplitter
Russell Banks
Born place: in Newton, Massachusetts, The United States
Born date March 28, 1940
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“Do you practice the laugh, or is it a natural talent? Naw, I’m betting you practice.”
Jean-Claude’s face twisted. I couldn’t decide if he was trying not to laugh, or not to frown. Maybe both. I affected some people that way.
The laughter seeped out of her face, very human, until only her eyes sparkled. There was nothing funny about the look in those twinkling eyes. It was the sort of look a cat gives a small bird.
Her voice lifted at the end of each word, a Shirley Temple affectation. “You are either very brave, or very stupid.”
“You really need at least one dimple to go with the laugh.”
Jean-Claude said softly, “I’m betting on stupid.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, quote from Guilty Pleasures
“Mary-Lynnette had an inexplicable impulse to knock Ash flat and fall down on top of him. She'd never felt that for any boy before.”
― L.J. Smith, quote from Night World, No. 1
“The truth," he says, "is a painful reminder of why I prefer to live among the lies.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unravel Me
“Some of the most profound truths about us are things that we stop saying in the middle.”
― Ned Vizzini, quote from It's Kind of a Funny Story
“Even then, more than a year earlier, there were neurons in her head, not far from her ears, that were being strangled to death, too quietly for her to hear them. Some would argue that things were going so insiduously wrong that the neurons themselves initiated events that would lead to their own destruction. Whether it was molecular murder or cellular suicide, they were unable to warn her of what was happening before they died.”
― Lisa Genova, quote from Still Alice
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After You'd Gone
Brooklyn
The Descendants
The Ghost Writer
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