A Quote by Hilton Als

Our wishes are our most reliable mirror, and the black-and-white movies I'm most drawn to are about artists who suffer because art is a noble thing; suffering is such a small price to pay for the imagination.
At some point, we have each said through our tears, “I’m suffering for a love that’s not worth it.” We suffer because we feel we are giving more than we receive. We suffer because our love is going unrecognized. We suffer because we are unable to impose our own rules. But ultimately there is no good reason for our suffering, for in every love lies the seed of our growth.
Our condition is most noble, being so beloved of the Most High God that He was willing to die for our sake- which He would not have done if man had not been a most noble creature and of great worth.
If you think about human nature, our favourite pair of shoes are the ones we bought yesterday, our favourite thing is the newest thing that we have…and the thing we’ve seen the most and for the longest period of time is our reflection in the mirror, so obviously that’s going to be our least favourite thing.
We had this terrible thing, this awful thing with 'Black and White' happened, where the design of 'Black and White' was actually... was hijacked by the fan sites. Because what happened is, there were so many fan sites on 'Black and White,' the hype on 'Black and White' was just ridiculously huge. It was completely out of our control.
I realized that most white Americans knew very little about our history and our struggle, and were having difficulty understanding the basis for our agitation and our resistance and our complaints. I also discovered that while black Americans had a sense of the beauty and tragedy of the journey from the time of slavery until now, we were not rooted in the specifics. I thought one way to familiarize people with that history would be through the voices of the great folk artists.
Later, I would realize that the position of most black students in predominantly white colleges was already too tenuous, our identities too scrambled, to admit to ourselves that our black pride remained incomplete. And to admit our doubt and confusion to whites, to open up our psyches to general examination by those who had caused so much of the damage in the first place, seemed ludicrous, itself an expression of self-hatred - for there seemed no reason to expect that whites would look at our private struggles as a mirror into their own souls, rather than yet more evidence of black pathology.
Zimbabwe has lots of safaris, but very few are African. Most are white-owned. In our region, we have the most safaris and animals. Our people cannot keep suffering.
There isn't only one way that black art or entertainment is represented, and that's the most important thing. We're permeating every style. We're claiming and, when necessary, appropriating all kinds of forms. Nothing is forbidden, because it's not what black people do: because it's not what we think of as black art.
The thing I'm most proud of about - not all of our movies, but a lot of our movies - is that you might love 'em, you might hate 'em, but most of the time, they're trying to be different or trying new things, which I think is really important.
It seems that our politicians see the world in black and white, so why not our artists? Did Woody Allen's 'Manhattan' have to be in black and white? No. But is it fantastic that it was? To see New York like that? Yes!
In the end, the only heritage we have is our planet, and I have decided to go to the most pristine places on the planet and photograph them in the most honest way I know, with my point of view, and of course it is in black and white, because it is the only thing I know how to do.
In our culture, many of us idealize love. We see it as some lofty cure-all for all of life's problems. Our movies and our stories and our history all celebrate it as life's ultimate goal, the final solution for all of our pain and struggle. And because we idealize love, we overestimate it. As a result, our relationships pay a price.
We have to understand in order to be of help. We all have pain, but we tend to suppress it, because we don't want it to come up to our living room. the most important thing is that we need to be understood. We need someone to be able to listen to us and to understand us, then we will suffer less, but everyone is suffering, and no one wants to listen. We don't know how to express ourselves so that people can understand. because we suffer so much, the way we express our pain hurts other people, and they don't want to listen.
Art, although produced by man's hands, is something not created by hands alone, but something which wells up from a deeper source out of our soul.....My sympathies in the literary as well as in the artistic field are drawn most strongly to those artists in whom I see most the working of the soul.
Most of our difficulties, our hopes, and our worries are empty fantasies. Nothing has ever existed except this moment. That's all there is. That's all we are. Yet most human beings spend 50 to 90 percent or more of their time in their imagination, living in fantasy. We think about what has happened to us, what might have happened, how we feel about it, how we should be different, how others should be different, how it's all a shame, and on and on; it's all fantasy, all imagination. Memory is imagination. Every memory that we stick to devastates our life.
Come election time, black and white politicians put on their costumes of compassion and care, shake black hands, kiss black babies, sing 'We Shall Overcome' in black , and pray that we will ignore the reality of everyday suffering and the damage that is being done to our future in exchange for our votes.
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