A Quote by Arna Bontemps
How dare anyone, parent, schoolteacher, or merely literary critic, tell me not to act colored.
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All I am in private life is a literary critic and historian, that's my job...And I'm prepared to say on that basis if anyone thinks the Gospels are either legends or novels, then that person is simply showing his incompetence as a literary critic. I've read a great many novels and I know a fair amount about the legends that grew up among early people, and I know perfectly well the Gospels are not that kind of stuff.
My job is to be a role model, and that's what I want to do, but my job isn't to be a parent. My job isn't to tell your kids how to act or how not to act, because I'm still figuring that out for myself. So to take that away from me is a bit selfish. Your kids are going to make mistakes whether I do or not. That's just life.
And what's more I've got no need for anyone to tell me how to do it. I am not interested. You act how you want to and leave me alone to do my own thing.
Any one who chooses will set up for a literary critic, though he cannot tell us where he went to school, or how much time was spent in his education, and knows nothing about letters at all.
The critic ... should be not merely a poet, not merely a philosopher, not merely an observer, but tempered of all three.
Edmund Wilson was our greatest American literary critic because he was more than a literary critic: He was a fearless, even radical judge of the society he lived in. (See, for example, _A Piece of My Mind_; _The Cold War and the Income Tax_; the introduction to _Patriotic Gore_.) Our conventional critics cannot forgive him for those scandalous lapses in good taste.
The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.
No publisher should ever express an opinion on the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide. I can quite understand how any ordinary critic would be strongly prejudiced against a work that was accompanied by a premature and unnecessary panegyric from the publisher. A publisher is simply a useful middle-man. It is not for him to anticipate the verdict of criticism.
Everything is possible to him who wills only what is true! Rest in Nature, study, know, then dare; dare to will, dare to act and be silent!
I think I'm just as good as anyone. That's the way I was brought up. I'll tell you a secret: I think I'm better! Ha! I remember being aware that colored people were supposed to feel inferior. I knew I was a smart little thing, a personality, an individual - a human being! I couldn't understand how people could look at me and not see that, because it sure was obvious to me.
Governments are different, and philosophies are different, but when it comes down to it, a schoolteacher is a schoolteacher is a schoolteacher. A butcher is a butcher is a butcher. We are people. And we are far more common than we ever imagine.
How dare you have wino tell me not to do drugs.
If a critic doesn't think I can act, it's because I'm not acting. That's me - and that's the way I act.
Most of my professional work has been in these areas - as a historical critic, as a literary critic. I've done very little in the history of interpretation [as Elie Wiesel has]. I've been interested in it, but I have not contributed to that field, really.
True, we must dare look things in the face before we dare think, speak, act, or assume responsibility. If we dare not even look, what else are we good for?
The traditional paradigm of parenting has been very hierarchical, the parent knows best and very top down. Conscious parenting topples [this paradigm] on its head and creates this mutuality, this circularity where both parent and child serve each other and where in fact, perhaps, the child could be even more of a guru for the parent .... teaching the parent how the parent needs to grow, teaching the parent how to enter the present moment like only children know how to do.
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