Black Lizard Quotes

Nothing in life is fair. Fair is a dirty word and I'll thank you not to use that language around me. ~ Jeff Lindsay

Earlier that day, a typewriter bomb had exploded at a black market skin house over on Eel Street, sending words raining through the cardboard walls of the boudoirs and tattooing copies of the Machinist's 'Twelve Terms' on the bodies of whores and patrons alike. Forty pieces of merch ruined. Their bodies had been obliterated by language, all traces of their sexuality buried beneath a storm of words. There was something horrific about the sight of those who had survived a typewriter attack. Their faces scarred with text, as if they had become hostages to some awful advertisement. A few of the victims took to working the streets around the library where bibliophiles sometimes paid them to satisfy their fantasies amid the desolate hush of the reading rooms and the deserted stacks where the only witnesses to this erotic pantomime of the blank body and its printed partner were other words. ~ Craig Padawer

When you live by karma and conscience alone, there is no one to repent to, except yourself. ~ Robert Black

The Great Spirit is everywhere; he hears whatever is in our minds and our hearts, and it is not necessary to speak to Him in a loud voice. ~ Black Elk

At twenty-one, Richard Wright was not the world-famous author he would eventually be. But poor and black, he decided he would read and no one could stop him. Did he storm the library and make a scene? No, not in the Jim Crow South he didn't. Instead, he forged a note that said, "Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by HL Mencken?" (because no one would write that about themselves, right?), and checked them out with a stolen library card, pretending they were for someone else. With the stakes this high, you better be willing to bend the rules or do something desperate or crazy. To thumb your nose at the authorities and say: What? This is not a bridge. I don't know what you're talking about. Or, in some cases, giving the middle finger to the people trying to hold you down and blowing right through their evil, disgusting rules. Pragmatism is not so much realism as flexibility. ~ Ryan Holiday

My breath returned as I observed my escort. He was wearing the same black coat and trousers from the evening of Sir Winston's ball. No strange clothes, altered features, or even a false mustache. He cared not one whit about his reputation. "Fine disguise," I said. ~ Tarun Shanker

In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable. ~ Angela Davis

They're people who probably imagine that they would have had a better time in the past. I wouldn't imagine you'd encounter a lot of black people saying 'Oh, the '50s, that was when America was great.' It's very dangerous because the past was imperfect, and you can't go back anyway. ~ Christine Jennings

He'd folded the card into a shape that clearly resembled a lizard, with one spade as its eye. ~ Virna DePaul

King and Arum are alike. One's black and one's white. That's the only difference. ~ Pinklon Thomas

It's easy to say you will do what's right and shun what's wrong, but when you get close enough to any given situation, you realize that there is no black or white. There are gradations of gray. ~ Jodi Picoult

The world was in truth made of jackstraws. The world was very combustible, the human body was partible in ways heretofore unimagined. What held the civilized world together was the thinnest tissue of nothing but human will. Civilization was not in the natural order but was some wort of willed invention held taut like a fabric or a sail against the chaos of the winds. And why we had invented it, or how we knew to invent it, was beyond him.
Newmann had seen some truth that was completely out of his power to put into words. But he had come away knowing that even though the world of civilization was made of straw and lantern slides, he must live in it as if it were solid. Even when the heat of the lantern itself burnt away the illusions and a black hole appeared in the middle of the slide. ~ Paulette Jiles

I swim all the time at night - I've always been a water girl. It's a black-bottom pool and my pool light was out, and as I've done a thousand times I just kind of did a little seal dive. I saw a huge bright light and I literally thought, 'That's it.' ~ Brooke Burns

In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind, old men as guides. ~ Heinrich Heine

Then, all of a sudden, there was a great black hull, stretching farther than my eye could see. ~ Ellen Emerson White

Nice gate,Ella."
I looked back at Daniel. He waved torward my lap.
"Oh." I draw on my eans when I don't have paper.My bus had gotten stuck behind a trash truck, right in front of a seriously old churchyard. "Thanks." I wasn't sure how I felt about Daniel staring at my thigh, even if he had recognized the sketch for what it was.
"Here." Suddenly, he had a booted foot on the rung of my chair, legs spread, one pressed against mine. "Draw something."
"Oh,please," Frankie muttered from his other side.
I shook my head. "I don't have a pen."
Sadie promptly disappeared beneath the table.I could hear the clank of Marc acobs chain handles and had a feeling in a second she would be asking, "Blue ink or black?"
"Don't you dare,Sadie," Frankie said cheerfully. "Ella does not want to be inscribing my brother's crotch."
True, I didn't. Except I had the clearest vision of how a little Italian portal devil would look on the faded denim...
"Fair enough," Daniel said, sliding his foot off my chair. But he actually looked disappointed. For a second, anyway. "I assume there's food coming?"
"There is," Frankie answered. "I'm sure it will come a hell of a lot faster if you do your vampire boy thing on Chloe again."
"Tsk,tsk. Jealousy, Miss Thing."
They bared their teeth at each other. It was scarily pretty. ~ Melissa Jensen

I got used to birds: small black birds flying up from behind a building like God had tossed up a handful of currants, birds squalling in the parking lot of the grocery store (drowning the hum of industrial refrigerators), chachalacas -brown robed nuns to the spangled disco dancer peacocks - cackling in the dust of our yard. I got used to the chatters, squeaks, squalls, peeps, calls that sounded like bitter laughter, whistles, flutes, calls that sounded like souls ascending to heaven. I got used to dust and flatness, to sunsets like pink water pouring from the sky, flooding the earth with orange soda. I got used to wind: the hot, cruel wind of afternoon, the merciful magnolia breeze of night. I got used to it. But then I had to go. ~ Kathleen Founds

I'm searching for some exit poll data from California. I'll eat my shorts if gay and lesbian voters went for McCain at anything approaching the rate that black voters went for Prop 8. ~ Dan Savage

The message that society sends to black women is that their hair does not belong to them but is fair game to be discussed, mocked, judged, used, and abused, and it serves as a home for people's preconceived notions about blackness, as if it is an abstract concept that is not connected to living, breathing, and feeling human beings. ~ Phoebe Robinson

It was a dead swan. Its body lay contorted on the beach like an abandoned lover. I looked at the bird for a long time. There was no blood on its feathers, no sight of gunshot. Most likely, a late migrant from the north slapped silly by a ravenous Great Salt Lake. The swan may have drowned. I knelt beside the bird, took off my deerskin gloves, and began smoothing feathers. Its body was still limp - the swan had not been dead long. I lifted both wings out from under its belly and spread them on the sand. Untangling the long neck which was wrapped around itself was more difficult, but finally I was able to straighten it, resting the swan's chin flat against the shore. The small dark eyes had sunk behind the yellow lores. It was a whistling swan. I looked for two black stones, found them, and placed them over the eyes like coins. They held. And, using my own saliva as my mother and grandmother had done to wash my face, I washed the swan's black bill and feet until they shone like patent leather. I have no idea of the amount of time that passed in the preparation of the swan. What I remember most is lying next to its body and imagining the great white bird in flight. I imagined the great heart that propelled the bird forward day after day, night after night. Imagined the deep breaths taken as it lifted from the arctic tundra, the camaraderie within the flock. I imagined the stars seen and recognized on clear autumn nights as they navigated south. Imagined their silhouettes passing ~ Terry Tempest Williams

My uniform: grey suit, white shirt, grey tie and tie bar, grey cardigan and black wingtips. ~ Thom Browne

Black people loving and losing is something we don't see enough of. We're always in these heightened situations like something big is happening, something funny or something violent. And you know what? Sometimes we die of breast cancer or a broken heart. Things happen that are just not being explored cinematically. It's time we reinvigorated that type of film. ~ Ava DuVernay

What if I am? It seems to me that most men are grey." "If half of an onion is black with rot, it is a rotten onion. ~ George R R Martin

Most destructive of all to black self-esteem has been the ideology of branqueamento or whitening. This theory was dreamed up in the 1920s to stop Brazil becoming a predominantly black country. White immigration from Europe was encouraged to stem the black tide. The black in Brazil will disappear within 70 years, said one congressman in 1923. ~ Kevin Jackson

I didn't really understand racism because I grew up in an all-black society, so I didn't see how it was possible not to like me! ~ Jamaica Kincaid

I bet you never heard of a playa with no game,
Told the truth to get what I want, but shot it with no shame.
Take this music dead serious while others entertain.
I see they makin' they paper so I guess I can't complain ... or can I?
I feel they disrespectin' the whole thang.
Them hooks like sellin' dope to black folks,
And I choke when the food they serve ain't tastin' right,
My stomach can't digest it even when I bless it ... ~ Andre Benjamin

I go downstairs and the books blink at me from the shelves. Or stare. In a trick of the light, a row of them seems to shift very slightly, like a curtain blown by the breeze through an open window. Red is next to blue is next to cream is adjacent to beige. But when I look again, cream is next to green is next to black. A tall book shelters a small book, a huge Folio bullies a cowering line of Quartos. A child's nursery rhyme book does not have the language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless. ~ Susan Hill

Sometimes I dream about it, I'm walking down this long empty hall. My voice echoes all around, but no one answers, so I walk faster, opening doors, shouting names. I don't even know who I'm looking for. Most nights it's my father, but sometimes it's Robb instead, or my little sister Arya, or my uncle. Even the ravens are gone from the rookery, and the stables are full of bones. That always scares me. I start to run then, throwing open doors, climbing the tower three steps at a time, screaming for someone, for anyone. And then I find myself in front of the door to the crypts. It's black inside, and I can see the steps spiraling down. Somehow I know I have to go down there, but I don't want to. I'm afraid of what might be waiting for me. The old Kings of Winter are down there, sitting on their thrones with stone wolves at their feet and iron swords across their laps, but it's not them I'm afraid of. I scream that I'm not a Stark, that this isn't my place, but it's no good, I have to go anyway, so I start down, feeling the walls as I descend, with no torch to light the way. It gets darker and darker, until I want to scream" -Jon Snow ~ George R.R. Martin

And I do have one surefire plot I have not and probably never will write because of my fear someone will carry it out. ~ Greg Iles

Nobody wears a black mask forever. ~ Willowy Whisper

The First Amendment allows Nazis and white extremists to do what they are going to do, and it allows for black extremists and all other types of extremists to do what they are going to do. I understand that, and I'm not opposed to that. ~ Niger Innis

Well it has been very exciting and very changing as well. Celebrating the 40th year and having the album out and the Channel 4 documentary and I resigned from Blind Date. ~ Cilla Black

Draped across an armchair lay his famous long black coat, empty now, and hollow with missing him. ~ Frank Delaney

Large men in black plate mail with red cloaks and plumes don't sneak worth a damn. ~ Tanya Huff

Wherever I go, people ask: 'What is she? What is she?' There has always been an agenda - they're excluding me or including me in something with that question. It is the first thing agents in Los Angeles ask me. And then I'd hear: 'You're not black enough, you're too black, you're Italian - no, you're Spanish.' ~ Roma Maffia

Nine days after Perreault first saw the woman in black, an Indonesian mother of four came out of her tent long enough to claim that the mermaid had risen, fully-formed, from the very center of the quake.
One of her boys, hearing this, said that he'd heard it was the other way around. ~ Peter Watts

When there is a lot of power concentrated in one place, there are plenty of scraps to fight over. If the Court isn't busy drinking poison, then it's drinking bile. ~ Holly Black

He got a good glass for six hundred dollars.
His new job gave him leisure for stargazing.
Often he bid me come and have a look
Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside,
At a star quaking in the other end.
I recollect a night of broken clouds
And underfoot snow melted down to ice,
And melting further in the wind to mud.
Bradford and I had out the telescope.
We spread our two legs as it spread its three,
Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,
And standing at our leisure till the day broke,
Said some of the best things we ever said.
That telescope was christened the Star-Splitter,
Because it didn't do a thing but split
A star in two or three the way you split
A globule of quicksilver in your hand
With one stroke of your finger in the middle.
It's a star-splitter if there ever was one,
And ought to do some good if splitting stars
'Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood. ~ Robert Frost

We have a civil rights photo collection in our house, a big, beautiful coffee table book with images so vivid they cause jaws to drop. When my daughters and their friends pick it up to look at the young Black boys and girls in the middle of a dangerous struggle, I remind them that our eyes are trained to look at the Black faces and their determination as they walk to school. But I tell them also to look at the white faces in the background: the young, jeering faces shouting slurs and throwing things. "All of those folks are now around your granddad's age," I tell my daughters. They're still with us, and those people now walk around, every day, living with what they did, and either trying to rectify it in their brains, through penance, or voting for Donald Trump and passing that hatred down to their children's children. That is this country. Them. We cannot afford to pretend they don't live among us. ~ Michael Bennett

But worse things were about to be found in the bedroom: on the jeweller's wife's ottoman, in a casual pose, sprawled a third party- namely, a black cat of uncanny size, with a glass of vodka in one paw and a fork, on which he had managed to spear a pickled mushroom, in the other. , The Master and Magarita ~ Mikhail Bulgakov

I feel like decades ago it was either you're black, white, Asian or Hispanic, or whatever, but today we see more of an acceptance for people with multi-nationalities. ~ Annie Ilonzeh

In the '70s, in Britain, if you were going to do serious photography, you were obliged to work in black-and-white. Color was the palette of commercial photography and snapshot photography. ~ Martin Parr

I was amplifying the negative at the expense of the positive, not to serve any useful function, not to make my writing better, but to destroy it. The lizard brain, so attuned to people laughing behind our backs, was on high alert for this sort of criticism and would do anything it could to stop me from writing again. I haven't sought out and read a review or a tweet since. ~ Seth Godin

They look, I said. They look in all our rooms.
What for? he said.
I think I lost control then, a little. Razor blades, I said, Books, writing, black market stuff. All things we aren't supposed to have. ~ Margaret Atwood

If I can't eat the meal in a restaurant, and the waiter asks, 'Is everything all right, Madam?', I tell them that I'm on a diet. ~ Cilla Black

Magic is seldom so convenient as to conform to our preferences. ~ Holly Black

My eyes swept down to his soft black t-shirt that read: "don't do school, eat your drugs, stay in vegetables". ~ R.S. Grey