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Lillian Smith

Lillian Smith Quotes

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Famous Lillian Smith Quotes

“Those faces on Main Street shaded by wide straw hats are surrounded in my child-memory by hardware and ploughs, seed bags and bales of cotton, the smell of guano and mule lots, hot sun on sidewalks and lovely white ladies with sweet childlike voices and smooth childlike faces, and Old gardens of boxwood and camellias, and fields endlessly curving around my small world. I know now that the bitterness, the cruel sensual lips, the quick fears in hard eyes, the sashshaying buttocks of brown girls, the thin childish voices of white women, had a great deal to do with high interest at the bank and low wages in the mills and gullied fields and lynchings and Ku Klux Klan and segregation and sacred womanhood and revivals, and Prohibition. And that no part of this memory can be understood without recalling it all of it.”

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“To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality; the place where fantasy and earthly things are metamorphosed into a work of art; the hour when faith in the future becomes knowledge of the past; to lay down one's power for others in need; to shake off the old ordeal and get ready for the new; to question, knowing that never can the full answer be found; to accept uncertainties quietly, even our incomplete knowledge of God; this is what man's journey is about, I think.”

ThinkingMenLifeNeedsArtFactsDreamRealityPastFoundHoursAnswersAcceptingFantasyKnowingJourneyReadyLaysUncertaintyShakesWorks Of ArtDelicateHypothesisIncompleteEquilibriumDreams And RealityKnowledge Of GodOrdealsEarthly ThingsKnowledge Of The PastIncomplete Knowledge
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“For men tied fast to the absolute, bled of their differences, drained of their dreams by authoritarian leeches until nothing but pulp is left, become a massive, sick Thing whose sheer weight is used ruthlessly by ambitious men. Here is the real enemy of the people: our own selves dehumanized into the masses. And where is the David who can slay this giant?”

PeopleMenRealSelfDreamUsedLeftDifferencesEnemyMassSickWeightAbsolutesGiantsMassiveAmbitiousTiedSheerDrainedPulpLeechesAmbitious Man
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“Belief in Some One's right to punish you is the fate of all children in Judaic-Christian culture. But nowhere else, perhaps, have the rich seed-beds of Western homes found such a growing climate for guilt as is produced in the South by the combination of a warm moist evangelism and racial segregation.”

ChildrenHomeChristianCultureFoundBeliefRichFateGrowingAtheismBedGuiltSouthClimateWesternWarmPositive AtheismSeedsCombinationSegregationEvangelismRacial Segregation
Author:Lillian Smith
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