The 2000s | Carolina Quotes

“Ain’t my business,” I said. Like always, I was waiting to see how it was. “That’s right, John, it ain’t your business,” the devil said. “Nothing I do is any of your business, John, but everything you do is mine.”

Max, you are a melodrama with no audience and a cast of one!

She didn’t look around as I slammed the front door and locked it, just like I promised I’d do—cept I was outside the door, on the porch, when I done it.

I knew this way well. It was the track to the praying ground, where are the colored folks on that part of St. Helena met to have their Christian worship, far from white men and their devilments. What there is bout a colored church service that so riles up the white trash, I didn’t know then and I don’t know now, cept maybe they hate to see us going straight to the true Master, you know, and skipping the middleman.

Mr. Davis was a Senator, you know, before he became a professional Southerner, and a Senator can out-talk any man—can make you think a horse-chestnut is a chestnut horse.

People will say bout anything. That don’t mean I have to believe it. What I see with my own eyes, that I believe.

Stephen knew I first served the Church by stocking reliquaries—transmuting unused bits of rotting paupers into the toes and teeth of saints.

Oh, those sanctified fields and vineyards, always heard of but never seen! Surely there, we thought, the starving could pluck and eat in peace, free of the pious prattle that we choked down with our meals in Rome. In this we were correct. As I rose higher in the church, the meals grew more substantial and the piety less burdensome. I saw the lame and the dying leaping like frogs around a finger bone that had been fondling a milkmaid not two weeks before.

I asked Formosus how his trial was proceeding thus far. Less and less of God, and more and more of man It is of God, as well, I replied. It is mad and pointless, and inefficient. It is godlike.

“I don’t allow officers to mince words with me, Colonel. You must speak freely and frankly.” “General, they are ignoramuses.” “I believe the phrase you were groping for, Colonel, is goddamn worthless ignoramuses, but you’re definitely on the right track.

I went, shouted louder and louder, tried to clear my mind so that, when necessary, I could act without thinking, act like a soldier.

In everyone’s life there are crossroads, moments of decision, however insignificant. To spot the crucial moments in his life, and act, makes a great soldier. To spot the crucial moments on a larger scale, a grand scale—that’s the work of a general.

It’s an insane idea, yes, but hell, this is war. If insanity works, a general is duty-bound to use it.

God's angels often protect his servants from potential enemies.

I always look at nature; that will never change.

We need a regime change in this country.... If we launch a pre-emptive strike on Iraq we lose all moral authority.

Fiction is something that I've always wanted to write. I think that I give myself a break when I write fiction. And that's not to take anything away from people that write fiction, because I know that it's just as taxing, and there's so much involved with that. But for me, I write poems because I have to, and I write stories because I want to. When I'm writing stories, I tend to write stories when, like right now, I'm writing a lot of stories because I'm trying to get away from this collection of poems. It's just killing me. But, that's kind of what it is for me.

It's a fantastically specialized universe, but how in the world did it happen?

I didn't realize quite how liberal I was until I was asked to make passionate comedic choices as opposed to necessarily successful comedic choices.

I think that Jesus would be disappointed in our ignoring the plight of those around us who are suffering and our focus on our own selfish short-term needs. I think he would be appalled, actually.

See, Barack been, um, talking down to black people on this faith-based... I want to cut his nuts off. Barack, he's talking down to black people.

Well, on the one hand, I saw President Barack Obama standing there looking so majestic, and I knew the people in the villages of Kenya and Haiti and mansions and palaces in Europe and China were all watching this young African-American male assume the leadership to take our nation out of a pit to a higher place. And then, I thought about who was not there. As I mentioned, Medgar Evers, the late husband of sister Myrlie. There's Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney, two Jews and a black killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi. And Jimmie Lee Jackson. So the martyrs and the murdered whose blood made last night possible. I could not help but think this was their night. And if I had one wish, if Medgar or if Dr. King could have just been there for a second in time, it would have made my heart rejoice. And so, it was kind of the dual thought of his ascendance in leadership and the price that was paid to get him there.

And we have so much work to do in America, because all across America, there are walls ... There's a wall around Washington, D.C. The American people are, today, on the outside of that wall. And on the inside are the big corporations and the lobbyists who are working to protect a system that takes care of them. ... There is another wall that divides us. It's the moral shame of 37 million of our own people who wake up in poverty every single day This is not OK. And for eight long, long years, this wall has gotten taller And there's also a wall that's divided our image in the world. The America as the beacon of hope is behind that wall. And all the world sees now is a bully. They see Iraq, Guantanamo, secret prison and government that argues that water boarding is not torture. This is not OK. That wall has to come down for the sake of our ideals and our security. We can change this. We can change it. Yes we can. If we stand together, we can change it. ... This is not going to be easy. It's going to be the fight of our lives. But we're ready, because we know that this election is about something bigger than the tired old hateful politics of the past. This election is about taking down these walls that divide us, so that we can see what's possible -- what's possible, that one America that we can build together.

You can't beat white people, you can only knock them out.