Relationships and Family

“I hate you, I hate you!” cried Madeline, a thing I didn’t know anyone ever said except in the second act of a musical comedy.

We said there warn’t no home like a raft, afterall. Other places do seem so cramped up andsmothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.

Rabbit realized the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporaryarrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of the money. You just passedthrough, and they milked you for what youwere worth, mostly when you were young andgullible.

Not only does democracy make everyman forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens to the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

They told him that their ancestors had fled the disorders of Ch’in times and, havingtaken refuge here with wives and childrenand neighbors, had never ventured out again; consequently they had lost all contact with the outside world.

Everything is gratuitous, this garden, this city and myself. When you suddenly realize it, it makes you feel sick and everything begins to drift . . . that’s nausea.

She has always been there, my darling.

She has always been there, my darling.

One evening, I sat Beauty in my lap.—And I found her bitter.—And I cursed her.

Remember, remember always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.

But, once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!

In a month, in a year, how will we bear that so many seas separate me from you?

“My uncle always was respected;

To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame

I like for you to be still, and you seem far away.

In Africa, when an old man dies, it is a library burning.

Soon the birds and ancients

While one can do nothing about choosing one’s relatives, one can, as artist, choose one’s “ancestors.”

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom.

[ Replying to anti-Semitic taunting in the House of Commons :] Yes, I am a Jew! When the ancestors of the honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple!

[ Remarks at debate, University of Stockholm, 1957 :] I have always denounced terrorism. I must also denounce a terrorism which is exercised blindly, in the streets of Algiers for example, and which some day could strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but I shall defend my mother above justice.

Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier . Mother died today, or maybe it was yesterday. L’Étranger (The Stranger) pt. 1, ch. 1 (1942)

[ Of the Black Death :] How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, breakfast with their kinfolk and the same night supped with their ancestors in the next world!

Every tradition grows continually more venerable, and the more remote its origin, the more this is lost sight of. The veneration paid the tradition accumulates from generation to generation, until it at last becomes holy and excites awe.