“Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a fear of discovery and change and a positive dread of everything unknown that may occur.”
“i know at last what i want to be when i grow up. when i grow up i want to be a little boy.”
“Maybe I am senile already and people are too kind to tell me. People are not kind and would tell me. (Maybe people have told me, and I'm too senile to remember).”
“I get the willies when I see closed doors.”
“I have a feeling that someone nearby is soon going to find out something about me that will mean the end, although I can't imagine what that something is.”
“I frequently feel I'm being taken advantage of merely because I'm asked to do the work I'm paid to do.”
“It's a real problem to decide whether it's more boring to do something boring than to pass along everything boring that comes in to somebody else and then have nothing to do at all.”
“I suppose it is just about impossible for someone like me to rebel anymore and produce any kind of lasting effect. I have lost the power to upset things that I had as a child; I can no longer change my environment or even disturb it seriously.”
“trying to evade the people who frighten us. We come to work, have lunch, and go home. We goose-step in and goose-step out, changing our partner and wander all about, sashay around for a pat on the head, and promenade home till we all drop dead.”
“That's what Paradise is- never knowing the difference.”
“Depreciating motels, junked automobiles, and quick-food joints grow like amber waves of grain.”
“And between us now there is this continual underground struggle over something trivial and nebulous that won't abate and has lasted nearly as long as the two of us have known each other. "I love you.”
“Niet nikoho, kým by som bol radšej než sám sebou - aj keď sa v skutočnosti nemám rád a dokonca som si ani nie istý, kto som.”
“This is a sickness rooted and inherent in the nature of a tyranny: that he that holds it does not trust his friends.”
“the worst thing that could happen to a colored child in the South was for a parent to hear that a child was acting up. There would be no appeals, the punishment swift and physical. The arbitrary nature of grown people’s wrath gave colored children practice for life in the caste system, which is why parents, forced to train their children in the ways of subservience, treated their children as the white people running things treated them. It was preparation for the lower-caste role children were expected to have mastered by puberty.”
“Desiree. It's like falling in love every night and having your heart broken every morning... Having more memory is just a way of distorting a greater amount of the past.”
“On the first day of Human Sexuality, Ruth Ramsey wore a short lime green skirt, a clingy black top, and strappy high-heeled sandals, the kind of attention-getting outfit she normally wouldn't have worn on a date---not that she was going on a lot of dates these days---let alone to work. ”
“I feel like I’m stuck in a bad movie, with a little devil sitting on one shoulder and an angel on the other. But the goddamn devil is twice the size and my angel is a fucking mute. Great, I have a fucking mute angel.”
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