Notes Of A Native Son Quotes
"The streets of a city where the buildings Negroes live in never stand straight up but lean in mourning every which way."
"A simple, unadorned statement, as if in saying it plainly the reader would have a better sense of the importance of that fact."
"The necessity of delving into oneself to be able to tell the truth about the world one writes about."
"Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves."
"You do not have to fully humanize your black characters by dehumanizing the white ones."
"I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."
"One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience."
"The past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly."
"I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that."
"The only real change vividly discernible in this present, unspeakably dangerous chaos is a panic-stricken apprehension on the part of those who have maligned and subjugated others."
"A movie is, literally, a series of images, and what one sees in a movie can really be taken, beyond its stammering or misleading dialogue, as the key to what the movie is actually involved in saying."
"It is true that no one in the original Carmen, least of all Carmen and her lover, are very clearly motivated; but there it scarcely matters because the opera is able to get by on a purely theatrical excitement."
"Carmen has come a long way from the auction block, but Joe, of course, cannot be far behind."
"The wicked sergeant who causes Joe to desert the army—in one of many wildly improbable scenes—and who has evil designs on Carmen is very dark indeed."
"And it must be said that one of the reasons for this is that, while the movie-makers are pleased to have Miss Dandridge flouncing about in tight skirts and plunging necklines—which is not exactly sexuality, either—the Negro male is still too loaded a quantity for them to know quite how to handle."
"The most important thing about this movie—and the reason that, despite itself, it is one of the most important all-Negro movies Hollywood has yet produced—is that the questions it leaves in the mind relate less to Negroes than to the interior life of Americans."
"Since darker races always seem to have for lighter races an aura of sexuality, this fact is not distressing in itself."
"It is axiomatic that the Negro is religious, which is to say that he stands in fear of the God our ancestors gave us and before whom we all tremble yet."
"The only other person in the world, as far as I knew, whose relationship to my father rivaled my aunt’s in depth was my mother, who was not there."
"The only white people who came to our house were welfare workers and bill collectors."
"To smash something is the ghetto’s chronic need. Most of the time it is the members of the ghetto who smash each other, and themselves."
"One is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene."
"Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law."
"It is the history of the total, and willing, alienation of entire peoples from their forebears."
"The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also absolutely inevitable."
"No one, after all, can be liked whose human weight and complexity cannot be, or has not been, admitted."
"It is of quite considerable significance that black men remain, in the imagination, and in overwhelming numbers in fact, beyond the disciplines of salvation."
"There is a great difference between being the first white man to be seen by Africans and being the first black man to be seen by whites."
"Europe’s black possessions remained—and do remain—in Europe’s colonies, at which remove they represented no threat whatever to European identity."
"The very nature of these abstractions reveals the tremendous effects the presence of the Negro has had on the American character."