Quotessence
Home / Topics / Obliviousness Quotes

Obliviousness Quotes

Browse 15 quotes about Obliviousness.

Obliviousness Quotes

“Never had I felt so much the slave as when I scoured those stone steps each afternoon. Working against time, I would wet five steps, sprinkle soap powder, then a white doctor or a nurse would come and, instead of avoiding the soppy steps, walk on them and track the dirty water onto the steps that I had already cleaned. To obviate this, I cleaned but two steps at a time, a distance over which a ten-year-old child could step. But it did no good. The white people still plopped their feet down into the dirty water and muddled the other clean steps. If I ever really hotly hated unthinking whites, it was then. Not once during my entire stay at the institute did a single white person show enough courtesy to avoid a wet step.”

Working ClassObliviousClassismObliviousness
Book:Black Boy
Create image

“The Karen Novotny Experience. As she powdered herself after her bath, Karen Novotny watched Trabert kneeling on the floor of the lounge, surrounded by the litter of photographs like an eccentric Zen cameraman. Since their meeting at the emergency conference on Space Medicine he had done nothing but shuffle the photographs of wrecked capsules and automobiles, searching for one face among the mutilated victims. Almost without thinking she had picked him up in the basement cinema after the secret Apollo film, attracted by his exhausted eyes and the torn flying jacket with its Vietnam flashes. Was he a doctor, or a patient? Neither category seemed valid, nor for that matter mutually exclusive. Their period in the apartment together had been one of almost narcotic domesticity. In the planes of her body, in the contours of her breasts and thighs, he seemed to mimetize all his dreams and obsessions.”

DenialUnconsciousnessObliviousnessDeformation
Book:The Atrocity Exhibition
Create image

“The world rising can put an end to anything: the murder of children whales elephants oceans. Get up. Roll over on that part of you that will not welcome recognize encourage or even see our rise. A compassionate roll: we must be done with cruelty especially to ourselves, to start again beaming like the sun; fresh. But a roll that shows we’ve reached the end of polite moves to repair and re-create the Earth, and will press hard on any parts of us even those we have loved, that insist on remaining oblivious and asleep.”

PoetryConsciousnessPoemActivismAwakeningWokenessObliviousness
Book:Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart
Create image