From The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas:
[U]ntil the day when God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words,—”Wait and hope.”
From The Reformatory, by Tananarive Due:
This land hid bones that had not been properly spoken for.
From The Tempest, by William Shakespeare:
You taught me language, and my profit on’t Is / I know how to curse.
From “On the Horizon: On Catfish Row,” a review of Porgy and Bess for Commentary, by James Baldwin:
What has always been missing from George Gershwin’s opera is what the situation of Porgy and Bess says about the white world. It is because of this omission that Americans are so proud of the opera. It assuages their guilt about Negroes and it attacks none of their fantasies. Since Catfish Row is clearly such a charming place to live, there is no need for them to trouble their consciences about the fact that the people who live there are still not allowed to move anywhere else. Neither need they probe within their own lives to discover what the Negroes of Catfish Row really mean to them. But I am certainly not the first person to suggest that these Negroes seem to speak to them of a better life—better in the sense of being more honest, more open, and more free: in a word, more sexual. This is the cruelest fantasy of all, hard to forgive. It means that Negroes are penalized, and hideously, for what the general guilty imagination makes of them. This fantasy is at the bottom of almost all violence against Negroes; it is the reason they are not to be mixed in buses, houses, schools, jobs; they are to remain instead in Catfish Row, to have fish fries and make love. It is a fantasy which is tearing the nation to pieces and it is surely time we snapped out of it. For nobody in Catfish Row is having fish fries these days, and love is as rare and as difficult there as it has always been everywhere else. They struggle to pay the rent, the life insurance, the note due on the bedroom suite, the TV set, the refrigerator, the car. They worry about their children. They begin to hate each other, they turn to mysticism or to dope, they die there.
