“Many people can rightfully claim, as much as anyone can rightfully claim anything, that much of their lives have been spent stumbling through a cloud of cluelessness.”

The Emancipation Proclamation…can remind us in 2013 of all the mistakes we never want to commit again but it can also motivate us to fulfill to an ever greater degree

The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.

His [Ben Okri’s] work poses very serious questions for the twenty-first century. Among them:

At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls.

At its most dynamic, faith evolves into powerful applicable knowledge.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented precisely such a hope – that America had learned from its past and acted to secure a better tomorrow.

In ways that synchronize images, ideas, emotions, sounds, smells, ignorance, and knowledge.

And the relentless suffocation of that singular breath which makes human beings individuals.

Ours is an age in which thousands are driven daily from their homelands by the unforgiving brutalities of war, terrorism, political oppression, starvation, disease, economic piracy

Often because the attempt to practice it is misunderstood, discouraged, brought under attack, or made a target of willful abuse.

Poetry looking in the mirror sees art, and art looking in a mirror sings poetry.

By consciously meditating upon spiritual truths and cultivating personal integrity, one need never fear negative circumstances.

The more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man’s inhumanity to man.

Although himself frequently a target of guerrilla decontextualization, a major part of the meaning of Michael Jackson’s life was to help balance the accumulation of horrors

An outrageous instinct to love and be loved blinded your arms to lines of propriety

In a rich moonlit garden, flowers open beneath the eyes of entire nations terrified to acknowledge the simplicity of the beauty of peace.

Every time you claim, “I am this”, you just claimed another sense perception, thought, emotion, or feeling.

White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn’t brought up to hate. But hate isn’t the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness.

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.

Noll is highly respected in Brazil, and at the same time divisive, somewhat like Hilda Hilst. Neither of them enjoys the universal acclaim you might associate with Clarice Lispector, whom everyone adores, myself included.

Rather than make claims of final theories, perhaps we should focus on our ever-continuing dialogue with the universe.

An organization which claims to be working for the needs of a community – as SNCC does – must work to provide that community with a position of strength from which to make its voice heard. This is the significance of black power beyond the slogan

Anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.’ I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.

No man can claim to be free in real terms unless he is fully in control of his own destiny!