Weldon Quotes & Sayings

Shortly after this I was made a member of the boys' choir, it being found that I possessed a clear, strong soprano voice. I enjoyed the singing very much. — James Weldon Johnson

I would never jeopardize classified information to be brought out to the public. This information is all open source. There is no reason to worry about classification. It is simply an attempt by bureaucrats to cover their rear ends. — Curt Weldon

You are young, gifted, and Black. We must begin to tell our young, There's a world waiting for you, Yours is the quest that's just begun. — James Weldon Johnson

People fail you, children disappoint you, thieves break in, moths corrupt, but an Order of the British Empire goes on for ever. — Fay Weldon

If you were casting the part of the evil scientist who would prove the Caped Crusader's deadliest nemesis, you'd likely glance at the headshot of German-born psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham, with his owl-like glasses and severe Prussian features, and think, "Nah, too on-the-nose. — Glen Weldon

My mother was kept very busy with her sewing; sometimes she would have another woman helping her. — James Weldon Johnson

Sound waves do not die out. They travel forever and forever. All our sentences are immortal. Our useless bleatings circle the universe for all eternity. — Fay Weldon

I had enjoyed life in Paris, and, taking all things into consideration, enjoyed it wholesomely. — James Weldon Johnson

Frigid bitch,' he seizes her hair, pulls back her head. He is strong: she is helpless: if he wishes to rape her, he could, he would. It is in the air. The little girls fall quiet: terror silences them. Ben makes love to Lucy, these days, with hatred, not with love. The love he feels for her (and he does) weakens him, softens him, makes him impotent. He feels it. She is far from frigid: she is ashamed of her response to his violence: frightened of being out of her own control - if she not a mother? — Fay Weldon

I always had trouble with the Bruce Wayne in the comic book," Burton said. "I mean, if this guy is so handsome, so rich, and so strong, why the fuck is he putting on a Batsuit? — Glen Weldon

The final two issues of the Englehart/Rogers/Austin collaboration, Detective Comics #475 and #476, are now esteemed alongside the greatest Batman stories ever created and would provide the seed for Tim Burton's 1989 feature film. In — Glen Weldon

The prophets of doom, in my experience, are generally ignored and usually right. — Fay Weldon

There is probably an innate masochism in a lot of women that ends up disappointed if men don't ill-treat them. — Fay Weldon

scream as you leave — Weldon Kees

Too young for a lot of things, but that didn't stop them from happening. — Weldon Burge

Nothing about the character was new. He was simply a combination of tropes from many sources: even his origin story itself was full of swipes. Kane — Glen Weldon

Saddam Hussein wrote the book on human rights violations. — Curt Weldon

We shelter children for a time; we live side by side with men; and that is all. We owe them nothing, and are owed nothing. I think we owe our friends more, especially our female friends. — Fay Weldon

...the performative online biliousness that has come to be known as trolling... — Glen Weldon

This story, I predict, will grow to be worse than Watergate. The American people need to have the answers. — Curt Weldon

When life gives ya lemons, THROW EM'! — Kevin Weldon

Anyone who remembered the grim, gun-toting, thug-murdering Batman of 1939 could see that he'd become a fundamentally different guy: a grinning, lantern-jawed, wisecracking adventure hero who'd left that emo "creature of the night" shtick far behind. — Glen Weldon

It is the memory of past happiness that makes the present so intolerable. — Fay Weldon

Writing is more than just the making of a series of comprehensible statements: it is the gathering in of connotations; the harvesting of them, like blackberries in a good season, ripe and heavy, snatched from among the thorns of logic. — Fay Weldon

And this is the dwarfing, warping, distorting influence which operates upon each and every colored man in the United States. He is forced to take his outlook on all things, not from the viewpoint of a citizen, or a man, or even a human being, but from the viewpoint of a colored man. It is wonderful to me that the race has progressed so broadly as it has, since most of its thought and all of its activity must run through the narrow neck of this one funnel — James Weldon Johnson

I like the dry-cleaners. I like the sense of refreshment and renewal. I like the way dirty old torn clothes are dumped, to be returned clean and wholesome in their slippery transparent cases. Better than confesssion any day. Here there is a true sense of rebirth, redemption, salvation. — Fay Weldon

As yet, the Negroes themselves do not fully appreciate these old slave songs. — James Weldon Johnson

Words are not simple things: they take unto themselves, as they have through time, power and meaning ... — Fay Weldon

A space was quickly cleared in the crowd, and a rope placed about his neck, when from somewhere came the suggestion, "Burn him!" It ran like an electric current. Have you ever witnessed the transformation of human beings into savage beasts? Nothing can be more terrible. — James Weldon Johnson

When one has seen something of the world and human nature, one must conclude, after all, that between people in like stations of life there is very little difference the world over. — James Weldon Johnson

One tends to suspect others of what one is guilty of oneself. The unfaithful wife is quick to suspect the husband of infidelity. — Fay Weldon

A 'weakness,' I now realize, is nothing but a strength not properly developed. — Fay Weldon

I was at the same time impressed with the falsity of the general idea that Frenchmen are excitable and emotional, and that Germans are calm and phlegmatic. Frenchmen are merely gay and never overwhelmed by their emotions. When they talk loud and fast, it is merely talk, while Germans get worked up and red in the face when sustaining an opinion, and in heated discussions are likely to allow their emotions to sweep them off their feet. — James Weldon Johnson

She described how Camus's aphorism "One must imagine Sisyphus happy" helps her fight back against unproductive feelings of meaninglessness.
If we consider, like Camus, Sisyphus at the foot of his mountain, we can see that he is smiling. He is content in his task of defying the Gods, the journey more important than the goal. To achieve a beginning, a middle, an end, a meaning to the chaos of creation - that's more than any deity seems to manage: But it's what writers do. So I tidy the desk, even polish it up a bit, stick some flowers in a vase and start.
As I begin a novel I remind myself as ever of Camus's admonition that the purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. And even while thinking, well, fat chance! I find courage, reach for the heights, and if the rock keeps rolling down again so it does. What the hell, start again. Rewrite. Be of good cheer. Smile on, Sisyphus! — Fay Weldon

Was this what she had shattered convention for; broken with her family, her friends? Everything she had ever known; doomed herself to eternal damnation, for the sake of what she had believed would be heaven on earth, and had turned out to be hell, here and now? — Fay Weldon

Ruby once told Margaret that Ben was an accident, but it wasn't true. The house just felt empty without a baby in it. Good God, why do women have such feelings: and worse, having them, why do they then act upon them? — Fay Weldon

I don't know what I want but it's not this. I don't want to be this person, I don't want to be trapped in this body, in this house, in this marriage.fay we — Fay Weldon

Ask any woman in an arranged marriage. Love is the least stressful way out. — Fay Weldon

I didn't even know I was a feminist until I read it on the back of one of my own books. — Fay Weldon

Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society. — Fay Weldon

Yet this perhaps is what love does, or the memory of it; it sucks the life from the living, glorying body and leaves it, when love has gone, a shred, a simulacrum - dross, to be swept up from the factory floor, pitiful and dusty, useless ... Do all men and women feel love before they die? This force, this source of light, that lies before the sun; glances off mountains and lakes, blinding and dazzling, on a Sunday afternoon; so brilliant you have to guard your soul, fold your arms to shield your heart from the very memory of it. — Fay Weldon

The peculiar fascination which the South held over my imagination and my limited capital decided me in favor of Atlanta University; so about the last of September I bade farewell to the friends and scenes of my boyhood and boarded a train for the South. — James Weldon Johnson

I like sex. I've had feedback but men will feed you back anything, won't they? — Fay Weldon

There are a great many colored people who are ashamed of the cake-walk, but I think they ought to be proud of it. — James Weldon Johnson

The really odd, unsettling thing was that Batman was smiling. Not — Glen Weldon

There were two immediate results of my forced loneliness: I began to find company in books, and greater pleasure in music. — James Weldon Johnson

So treasure your moments of happiness, the glimpses you see of truth, the nights you've been loved. That's all you've got. — Fay Weldon

Of course you have to believe in destiny; that everything is sheer chance is an intolerable notion. — Fay Weldon

New York had impressed me as a place where there was lots of money and not much difficulty in getting it. — James Weldon Johnson

If that was dying, I don't want to do it again. — Fay Weldon

Youth gives a sense of new days dawning bright, going on for ever, and a kind of tamped-down excitement which keeps breaking through even the worst days of poverty, depression and loneliness. But then youth is something which only exists in retrospect; you are barely conscious of it while you have it. — Fay Weldon

Detective Comic #27: The very first glimpse we get of the guy and already he looks pissed. — Glen Weldon

If anything happiness is a feeling of being essential — Fay Weldon

The fortress inspired a tremendous confidence. It was the only propeller driven aircraft I have flown that was completely viceless; there were no undesirable flight characteristics. The directional stability was excellent and, properly trimmed, the B-17 could be taken off, landed and banked without change of trim. — James Weldon Johnson

But if the Negro is so distinctly inferior, it is a strange thing to me that it takes such tremendous effort on the part of the white man to make him realize it, and to keep him in the same place into which inferior men naturally fall. — James Weldon Johnson

She was my first love, and I loved her as only a boy loves. — James Weldon Johnson

I am extremely disappointed by the actions of the 9/11 commission. — Curt Weldon

Labor is the fabled magician's wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune. — James Weldon Johnson

Worst fears: That God was not good. That the earth you stood upon shifted, and chasms yawned; that people, falling, clutched one another for help and none was forthcoming. That the basis of all things was evil. That the beauty of the evening, now settling in a yellow glow on the stone of The Cottage barns, the swallows dipping and soaring, a sudden host of butterflies in the long grasses in the foreground, was a lie; a deceitful sheen on which hopeful visions flitted momentarily, and that long, long ago evil had won against good, death over life... in the glow of the sun against the stone walls, as well as in the dancing of butterflies- that in this she had been mocked. — Fay Weldon

Grief is a lovely word and a lovely thing. It heals, as resentment cannot. Grief must be admitted and lived through, or it turns into resentment, and continues to bother you for the rest of your life, rearing its depressed little head at all the wrong moments, so that one Sunday tea time at the old lady's home you will unexpectedly begin to cry into your toasted teacake, and the nurses will say "Poor Mrs. Frazer, that's the end," and will move you into the senile ward, when the truth of the matter is quite different. It's not senility, but grief grown uncheckable with age. Myself, I cry now and eat now, so as not to cry later, when it is yet more dangerous. I shall make a very cheerful old lady. — Fay Weldon

I finished my studies in England, I opened my studio in London, and the first one-man exhibit I had on Bond Street, which was opened by the Austrian ambassador. — Felix De Weldon

And Satan smiled, stretched out his hand, and said, O War, of all the scourges of humanity, I crown you chief. — James Weldon Johnson

In the life of everyone there is a limited number of experiences which are not written upon the memory, but stamped there with a die; and in the long years after, they can be called up in detail, and every emotion that was stirred by them can be lived through anew; these are the tragedies of life. — James Weldon Johnson

No one could be more happy than a man who has never known affliction. — Fay Weldon

I thought of Paris as a beauty spot on the face of the earth, and of London as a big freckle. — James Weldon Johnson

But I must own that I also felt stirred by an unselfish desire to voice all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and ambitions, of the American Negro, in classic musical form. — James Weldon Johnson

A great wave of humiliation and shame swept over me. Shame that I belonged to a race that could be so dealt with; and shame for my country, that it, the great example of democracy to the world, should be the only civilized, if not the only state on earth, where a human being would be burned alive. — James Weldon Johnson

Some women are born mothers, some women become mothers, and some have motherhood thrust upon them. I struggled against it all my life, but I think the truth is I was probably born to it. I don't do badly, I don't do well, I just do it. — Fay Weldon

Man seems not so much wicked as frail, unable to face pain, trouble and growing old. A good woman knows that nature is her enemy. Look at what it does to her. — Fay Weldon

Americans are immensely popular in Paris; and this is not due solely to the fact that they spend lots of money there, for they spend just as much or more in London, and in the latter city they are merely tolerated because they do spend. — James Weldon Johnson

It is a struggle; for though the black man fights passively, he nevertheless fights; and his passive resistance is more effective at present than active resistance could possibly be. He bears the fury of the storm as does the willow tree. — James Weldon Johnson

It may be because Southerners are very much like Frenchmen in that they must talk; and not only must they talk, but they must express their opinions. — James Weldon Johnson

How has anyone ever understood anyone, except through love, which is wordless? — Fay Weldon

Take me! Well, not quite take me, love me now, take me eventually — Fay Weldon

As it has turned out, the whole relationship between men, women and children has tilted, to the disadvantage of women. — Fay Weldon

Truly, books are wonderful things; to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged! — Fay Weldon

Swan renders the gathering amusingly, depicting the vile android Brainiac, scourge of the galaxy, sitting on Clark's ottoman and chatting away with Luthor as if he's at some kind of Stitch-n-Bitch-of-Doom. — Glen Weldon

This homicide proves only the beginning of his murderous spree. In just the first year of his existence Batman will send some twenty-four men, two vampires, a pack of werewolves, and several giant mutants to their ultimate ends, occasionally at the business end of a gun. — Glen Weldon

Be bold, but not too bold. Have courage, but not too much. — Fay Weldon

She drank sweet coffee, sweet tea, sweet cocoa and sweet sherry. — Fay Weldon

The desire for self-expression afflicts people when they feel there is something of themselves which is not getting through to the outside world. — Fay Weldon

There is nothing opposed in Biometry and Mendelism. Your husband and I worked that out at Peppards [on the Chilterns] and you will see it referred in the Biometrika memoir. The Mendelian formula leads up to the 'ancestral law'. What we fought against was the slovenliness in applying Mendel's categories and asserting that such formulae apply in cases when they did not. — Karl Pearson

No one seemed able to look at themselves, coolly, from the outside. Their reality was all that could be seen in the light cast ahead by their own wishful thinking. — Fay Weldon

Mary Fisher lives in a High Tower, on the edge of the sea: she writes a great deal about the nature of love. She tells lies. — Faye Weldon

Make yourself as happy as possible, and try to make those happy whose lives come in touch with yours. But to attempt to right the wrongs and cease the sufferings of the world in general is a waste of effort. — James Weldon Johnson

Amsterdam was a great surprise to me. I had always thought of Venice as the city of canals; it had never entered my mind that I should find similar conditions in a Dutch town. — James Weldon Johnson

In Berlin I especially enjoyed the orchestral concerts, and I attended a large number of them. I formed the acquaintance of a good many musicians, several of whom spoke of my playing in high terms. — James Weldon Johnson

Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to the terrible horizon. — Fay Weldon

But the room is cold, the words in the books are cold;
And the question of whether we get what we ask for
Is absurd, unanswered by the sound of an unlatched door
Rattling in wind, or the sound of snow on roofs, or glare
Of the winter sun. What we have learned is not what we were told.
I watch the snow, feel for the heartbeat that is not there. — Weldon Kees

Style is what's there when you look at someone's writing and you know that they wrote it and nobody else did. — Fay Weldon

All mothers love their own children as best they can, according to their temperament and circumstances, and all mothers should have done better, in their children's eyes, when the going gets tough for the children. — Fay Weldon

Getting two sentences together is exhilarating. It is heaven. — Fay Weldon

Christy said. "It's just weird, your seeing him like that. What are you going to do?"
"Nothing. What can I do?"
"Maybe he'll call you to see if you're okay," Katie said.
"No," Christy said, "in the movies he would have told his friend to stop the car, and he would have run back to you with an umbrella and walked you the rest of the way hoe, and you would have made him a pot of tea."
Sierra laughed. "I am drinking tea right now," she said. "Maybe my life is a low budget 'B' movie, and all I get is the tea. No hero. No umbrella."
"Yeah, well then my life is a class 'Z' movie," Katie said. "No tea. No hero. No umbrella. No plot
"
"Yours is more of a mystery," Christy interrupted cheerfully. "The ending will surprise all of us. — Robin Jones Gunn

How can faceless bureaucrats in an intelligence agency deny brave soldiers a chance to tell the truth? — Curt Weldon

But the more she talked, the less was I reassured, and I stopped her by asking: "Well, mother, am I white? Are you white?" She answered tremblingly: "No, I am not white, but you - your father is one of the greatest men in the country - the best blood of the South is in you - " This suddenly opened up in my heart a fresh chasm of misgiving and fear, — James Weldon Johnson

Ambition will, and should, always outstrip achievement. — Fay Weldon

No one should be allowed to give back the gift of life, unless they are very old and full of tears, when the body outlives the spirit, when they should be allowed to join the others who've already gone. — Fay Weldon

Washington shows the Negro not only at his best, but also at his worst. — James Weldon Johnson

This Great God, Like a mammy bending over her baby, Kneeled down in the dust Toiling over a lump of clay Till He shaped it in His own image. — James Weldon Johnson

I was always furious because you couldn't take out more than three books in one day. You would go home with your three books and read them and it would still be only five o'clock. The library didn't shut till half past, but you couldn't change the books till the next day. — Fay Weldon