A fighter has to know fear.
The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.
At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.
You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human. . . . And although you don't have complete control over the narrative (no author does, I can tell you), you could nevertheless create it.
The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean.
And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still, it moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.
Black people's music is in a class by itself and always has been. There's nothing like it. The reason for that is because it was not tampered with by white people. It was not on the media. It was not anywhere except where black people were. And it is one of the art forms in which black people decided what is good in it. Nobody told them. What surfaced and what floated to the top, were the giants and the best.
In West Virginia, we're all family. We know how firefighters and policemen honor their own and we feel our miners deserve to be honored in a similar way.
Evil is short lived. Never judge of the whole round of life by the mere segment you can see. The whole is, in the end, perfect.
When I run across something that feels like a real eye-opener, it's gonna have an influence on me forever.
Flesh eating is unprovoked murder.