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Quote by Ishmael Reed

“American cultural institutions seem so bent on preserving the values of "Western civilization," the mythical "Whitetown," that welearn about one another's cultures the same way we learn about sex: in the streets.”

Quote by Ishmael Reed

Author

Ishmael Reed is an American poet, novelist, and playwright. Known for his unique literary style and profound exploration of racial, class, and gender issues, Reed was born on February 22, 1938. more

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“The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.”

Different Culture Race Education African American Treatment American Culture African American Culture Tarzan Movie

Book:Airing Dirty Laundry

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“Currently, U.S. society has been encouraged by its political and subsidized mass-media intelligentsia to view U.S. life as a continual "morning in America" paradise, where the only social problems occur in the inner cities. Psychologists call this denial.”

Has Beens Problem America Political Social Views Cities Morning Society Media Mass Denial Paradise Psychologist Mass Media Social Problems Inner City

Book:Airing Dirty Laundry

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“statistic: the us bureau of missing persons reports that in 1968 over 100,000 people disappeared leaving no solid clues nor traceonly a space in the lives of their friends.”

People Persons Space Missing Leaving Reports Statistics Clue Missing A Person

Book:New and collected poems

Source: New and collected poems

“Regardless of the criticisms I receive from the left, the right and the middle, I think it's important to maintain a prolific writing jab, as long as my literary legs hold up.”

Thinking Writing Long Important Left Middle Criticism Legs

Book:Writin' is fightin': thirty-seven years of boxing on paper

Source: Writin' is fightin': thirty-seven years of boxing on paper

“Poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common thingsor it may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth.”

May Two Eye Poetry Imagination Common Numbers Creativity Creation Poet Birth Exercise Aspect Ideals Function Add All Time Motive Poetic Imaginative Uncommon

Author:Walter Pater

“That the mere matter of a poem, for instance--its subject, its given incidents or situation; that the mere matter of a picture--the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape--should be nothing without the form, the spirit of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter;Mthis is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.”

Should Art Different Ends Matter Form Spirit Poetry Given Situation Achieve Subjects Events Poet Circumstances Degrees Unity Mere Strive Instance Landscape Strife Penetrate Incidents Topography

Author:Walter Pater

“It is with a rush of home-sickness that the thought of death presents itself.... Such sentiment is the eternal stock of all religions, modified indeed by changes of time and place, but indestructible, because its root is so deep in the earth of man's nature. The breath of religious initiators passes over them; a few "rise up with wings as eagles" [Isaiah 40:31], but the broad level of religious life is not permanently changed. Religious progress, like all purely spiritual progress, is confined to a few.”

“Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.”

Mind Law Language Minutes Products Various Tongue Recognition Association Obscure Scholarship Habitual Compact Summary Contending

Book:The Works of Walter Pater

Source: The Works of Walter Pater

“The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world ofits own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited.”

Source: The Renaissance

“For us necessity is not as of old an image without us, with whom we can do warfare; it is a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world.”

World Speak Force Can Do Magic Modern Nerves Warfare Woven Modern Science Magnetic

Book:Studies in the History of the Renaissance

Source: Studies in the History of the Renaissance