Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Walter Mosley

Quote by Walter Mosley

“I found out a lot about my father as he regaled my wife. He'd learned how to be a potter in a small village in Bolivia. There, working on a kick-wheel in a shack the size of an outhouse, he started thinking about the few novels he'd read.”

Quote by Walter Mosley

Book:The Awkward Black Man
Create image

Work

The Awkward Black Man

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Walter Mosley
Walter Mosley

Walter Mosley is an American novelist, best known for his detective novel series featuring Easy Rawlins. His works blend literary value with social commentary, earning him a wide readership. more

You May Also Like

“The attitude toward the forest people forms an important caveat to Ashoka's espousal of the principle of nonviolence. The fact that the warning to the forest people appears in an inscription that deals with the evils of warfare and the replacement of the goal of military victory by that of dhammic victory suggests that the armed insur- gency of the forest people posed a major political challenge to the Maurya state, one that could not be ignored even by an otherwise pacifist emperor. The king who repents on the devastation of war, declares that he has abjured it, and urges his successors to do like- wise, brandishes his power in front of the forest people and warns them to fall in line if they want to avoid his wrath.”

AshokaForest People
Book:Political Violence in Ancient India
Create image

“The few survivors were hounded into an evangelical concentration camp, where well-meaning but not particularly open-minded missionaries tried to indoctrinate them in the ways of the modern world. The Tasmanians were instructed in reading and writing, Christianity and various ‘productive skills’ such as sewing clothes and farming. But they refused to learn. They became ever more melancholic, stopped having children, lost all interest in life, and finally chose the only escape route from the modern world of science and progress – death.”

Tasmania
Book:Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Create image

“After an hour of sodden stomping they saw ghostly figures beckoning them through the dense cloud. Highland snow gums, colour-swirled and hardy, and alpine yellow gums, splashed with shades of lemon and olive. Skeletal in the mist. When they reached them, they saw fluorescent pink tags hanging from the twisted artwork of their branches. Orange bike lights hammered into dolerite boulders, beneath flakes of minty lichen. (p.193)”

LandscapeTasmaniaBushwalkingNative Vegetation
Book:Limberlost
Create image

“But mostly, finally, ultimately, I'm here for the weather. As a result of the weather, ours is a landscape in a minor key, a sketchy panorama where objects, both organic and inorganic, lack well-defined edges and tent to melt together, creating a perpetual blurred effect, as if God, after creating Northwestern Washington, had second thoughts and tried unsuccessfully to erase it. Living here is not unlike living inside a classical Chinese painting before the intense wisps of mineral pigment had dried upon the silk - although, depending on the bite in the wind, they're times when it's more akin to being trapped in a bad Chinese restaurant; a dubious joint where gruff waiters slam chopsticks against the horizon, where service is haphazard, noodles soggy, wallpaper a tad too green, and considerable amounts of tea are spilt; but in each and every fortune cookie there's a line of poetry you can never forget. Invariably, the poems comment on the weather. In the deepest, darkest heart of winter, when the sky resembles bad banana baby food for months on end, and the witch measles that meteorologists call "drizzle" are a chronic gray rash on the skin of the land, folks all around me sink into a dismal funk. Many are depressed, a few actually suicidal. But I, I grow happier with each fresh storm, each thickening of the crinkly stratocumulus. "What's so hot about the sun?" I ask. Sunbeams are a lot like tourists: intruding where they don't belong, promoting noise and forced activity, faking a shallow cheerfulness, dumb little cameras slung around their necks. Raindrops, on the other hand, introverted, feral, buddhistically cool, behave as if they were locals. Which, of course, they are.”

RainCloudsWeatherRaindropsSunbeamsWashingtonPnw
Book:Wild Ducks Flying Backward
Create image

“To know Seattle one must know its waterfront. It is a good waterfront, not as busy as New York's, not as self-consciously colorful as San Francisco's, not as exotic as New Orleans, but a good, honest, working waterfront with big gray warehouses and trim fishing boats and docks that smell of creosote, and sea gulls and tugs and seafood restaurants and beer joints and fish stores--a waterfront where you can hear foreign languages and buy shrunken heads and genuine stuffed mermaids, where you can watch the seamen follow the streetwalkers and the shore patrol follow the sailors, where you can stand at an open-air bar and drink clam nectar, or sit on a deadhead and watch the water, or go to an aquarium and look at an octopus.”

UrbanSeattlePnw
Book:Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle
Create image