you have often seen in the cinema, erich, haven't you, that between extraordinary people extraordinary things like for example extraordinary love can arise. so we only have to be extraordinary and see what happens.
perfectly happy momma goes out into the fields. she eavesdrops on herself, in case somewhere deep inside a melody rings out or a blackbird sings, but all that she hears, is only the cancer, which saws and eats away at her.
After he had set the table for tea, Adrian read the sporting pages of The Argus and then glanced through the front pages for the cheesecake picture that was always somewhere among the important news. It was usually a photograph of a young woman in bathers leaning far forward and smiling at the camera.
If the woman was an American film star he studied her carefully. He was always looking for photogenic starlets to play small roles in his American adventures.
If she was only a young Australian woman he read the caption ('Attractive Julie Starr found Melbourne's autumn sunshine too tempting to resist. The breeze was chilly, but Julie, a telephonist aged eighteen, braved the shallows at Elwood in her lunch hour and brought back memories of summer') and spent a few minutes trying to work out the size and shape of her breasts. Then he folded up the paper and forgot about her. He wanted no Melbourne typists and telephonists on his American journeys. He would feel uncomfortable if he saw on the train one morning some woman who had shared his American secrets only the night before.
Pain is memory with witness or corroboration. It isn't real to anyone else, and that is what allows torturers, including governments, to be torturers. They can pretend it isn't happening because it isn't happening to them.
“I used to hide behind doors. I spent my childhood hiding behind my grandmother’s stove. I was very lonely.’ Later, still in Positive: “I’ve gone through my while life like I was autistic, convinced I was worth nothing. I didn’t know who I was. I was all over the place, I had no pride.”
I also discover that she liked “Journey to the End of the Night” by Céline, “Nana” by Zola, “Breathless “by Godard, Maupassant’s short stories and Andy Warhol’s films.
The iconic woman of the 70’s is nothing but a woman wondering what she will do with her so-called liberty. She wonders what kind of lie she will be forced to invent in order to hide, at ease, from men, so that she will – finally – be left alone.
But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.
I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.
Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered.
So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.
I believed, and still do, that our bodies are our selves, that my soul is the voltage conducted through neurons and nerves, and that my spirit is my flesh.
It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.
