When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking questions, always new question, then it is time to die - Lillian E. Smith

The mother who taught me what I know of tenderness and love and compassion taught me also the bleak rituals of keeping Negroes in their 'place.' The father who rebuked me for an air of superiority toward schoolmates from the mill and rounded out his rebuke by gravely reminding me that 'all men are brothers,' trained me in the steel-rigid decorums I must demand of every colored male. They who so gravely taught me to split my body from my mind and both from my 'soul,' taught me also to split my conscience from my acts and Christianity from southern tradition.

I keep thinking about the fragmented quality of human awareness: You take your blindness for granted most of the time then suddenly it stuns you: how little you see as you plunge ahead from minute to minute, day to day, year to year - vision cut down to the arc of a flickering flashlight, never sure how your words and acts are affecting someone else because you never really see that someone as he is. I know we should find even the most serene life unendurable were we to possess to any real degree those extrasensory perceptions which our grandmothers believed in...

The human heart does not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.