“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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“I guard my memories of my lost one jealously, keep them securely under wraps, like a folio of delicate watercolours that must be protected from the harsh light of day.”
― John Banville, quote from Ancient Light
“We believe that the body hath its rights — to move in a reasonable ambit — to raise, to lower its limbs — but across the face of this earth, there are every day those who suffer unforgivable torments, strapped or chained, confined in boxes or in the holds of ships. May the Lord remind me of this always as I walk free upon paths, and may I thus always give thanks unto Him for the strange, small gifts of gesture, of simple tasks done with requisite care and sphere of action.”
― M.T. Anderson, quote from The Pox Party
“All the common people want is to be left alone. All the ordinary soldier wants is to collect his pay and not get killed. That's why the great forces of history can be manipulated by astonishingly small groups of determined people.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Empire
“from the willingness of an organization’s people to embrace full accountability for the results they seek.”
― quote from The Oz Principle: Getting Results Through Individual and Organizational Accountability
“A tallow dip, of the long-eight description,40 is an excellent thing in the kitchen candlestick, and Betty’s nose and eye are not sensitive to the difference between it and the finest wax; it is only when you stick it in the silver candlestick, and introduce it into the drawing-room, that it seems plebeian, dim, and ineffectual. Alas for the worthy man who, like that candle, gets himself into the wrong place! It is only the very largest souls who will be able to appreciate and pity him – who will discern and love sincerity of purpose amid all the bungling feebleness of achievement.”
― George Eliot, quote from Scenes of Clerical Life
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The Quiet GameBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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