“I am enthroned in azure; strange as a sphinx and I;
I blend a heart of snow with whiteness of a swan;
Abhorring changes where one line might come undone,
And I have never laughed, and I shall never cry.”
“Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone the elucidation of any conundrum—that is, any reality—so supremely difficult.”
“It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self-consciousness is not bare existence
, is not the merely immediate form in which it at first makes its appearance, is not its mere absorption in the expanse of life.”