Best 24 quotes of C. E. Morgan on MyQuotes

Anyone who lives with poor health or chronic pain, or who has endured poverty - real poverty - knows what it is to live with lack and a resulting fear so incessant that it becomes thoroughly normalized, invisible in its ubiquity. If you're lucky enough to have that fear begin to ease, it's an odd experience. A stranglehold eases off your entire body, one you never fully realized was there.

Every single aspect of a text requires very careful choices and rigorous evaluation. Style is employed - or deployed - for a reason. It's purposeful. Form and aesthetics are part of meaning-making. Ideally, a writer would have mastery over a wide variety of rhetorical gestures and tonalities, our lexicon and punctuation system, our grammar, and all the riches of a liberal and literary education.

Great literature rattles the mind and makes the body sing. It's an unmistakable, electric feeling, and too rare. That is what I want.

Humans struggle to remain attuned to one another - they want to turn away because of fear, or ambition, or boredom, or some lure of the ego. It's difficult. It requires radical vulnerability, radical risk.

I don't believe love is real love if it remains cloistered within the confines of an intimate relationship; it should transcend the private sphere. As an artist that means training an eye on the suffering in the world, then acting on behalf of others.

I have both experienced and witnessed a great deal of suffering in my life, and that has informed my art. I'm here today, because I'm a fighter. I didn't survive my life to ask permission to write my books.

I often think there are three primary responses to suffering - rage, intoxication, or growth. We either want revenge for our pain, or we numb ourselves with the endless array of intoxicants available to us, from drugs to overwork, or we grow in empathy. Emptiness can transform into spaciousness; lack can become an agent of social action. But I think many of us struggle to remain on that third path without backsliding into the other two. I do.

I stared at the Ohio River every day as a child, a thing that for me is almost more symbol than river. The formation of personality is inextricable from place. It strikes me as an interesting example of dependent co-arising; land shapes the organism, which then reshapes - literally and figuratively - the land. This because of this; not that because not that. Nothing is separate, least of all the literary mind.

I think of moral beauty as what is the good and the just - terms perhaps best defined by their opposite: evil. Evil is the willingness to do damage to the other; its maximal expression is murder, but it includes a great deal of subtle and not-so-subtle injuries as it advances to that extreme. Evil acts reduce the other to an object, a being to its component parts, and obliterate subjectivity. Evil's breeding ground is a lack of empathy.

I think the primary gift of the animal is offered to writer and non-writer alike; they teach us about love, or attunement, which is love in action. A lot of people have closer relationships with animals than they do with other humans, because real intimacy requires both parties to consistently lean in, and animals are so good at this. They remain consistently, amazingly attuned to us, even when we fail them, and so we stay present, because we sense we're safe.

I was taught as a young person that the far political right and the far political left aren't located on a spectrum but on a circle, where they inevitably meet in their extremity.

The idea that writing about characters of another race requires a passage through a critical gauntlet, which involves apology and self-examination of an almost punitive nature, as though the act of writing race was somehow morally suspect, is a dangerous one. This approach appears culturally sensitive, but often it reveals a failure of nerve. I believe the demand that we ought to reveals a species of fascism within the left - an embrace of political correctness with its required silences, which has left people afraid to offend or take a stand.

Ultimately, I don't know if love is an organizing principle we choose or if it's innate. I'm not sure the distinction matters to me much anymore; I just care about how we can reduce unnecessary suffering. I think that means learning to love in both the micro and the macro; engaging in ethical action at the level of intimacy and friendship, but also at the vocational level through our chosen work in the world, our right livelihood.

Ultimately, I want a peak experience in reading, and that is sometimes difficult to find in contemporary fiction. I'm not interested in books that are just clever and well executed; polish doesn't impress me, and I don't care about a merely capable sentence. Life is short; I want a confrontation with high art. I want soul.

When you leave good people afraid to speak on behalf of justice, however awkwardly or insensitively, those unafraid to speak will rise to power.

Because there is hunger. Like any desire, it’s only temporarily satisfied, which calls into question the reliability of satisfaction and whether such a state can be said to exist at all. Anything we eat knows us more intimately than a lover. Not merely the inside of our mouth but the esophagus, stomach, alimentary canal, upper and lower colon, sphincter. Everything we desire, we shit out and leave behind.

Father, we are uniquely capable of morality. We must be moral, because we can be moral. He stood very still as the words settled like silt to the floor of his veins. We can snatch from the air the abstractness of numbers, adding and subtracting and making logic from magic, and because we can, we do, and we must. We can build pyramids and sky-piercing towers, so we must. We can wrestle language from our grunting, so we must. We can map our physical mysteries with machines of our own making. We can classify the species of the earth, name every stone and streamlet. We can run a hundred miles, and we can walk on the face of the moon, so we must—and then we must go farther. We can, from the chaos of existence, extract meanings, which do not exist. We can make ourselves philosophers and scientists and priests. We can construct our unnatural civilizations—we can, and therefore we must. To starve our genes is to honor our genes. With fear and loathing we can stand on the necks of our parents and refuse them. We can evolve from simple to complex. We can choose survival of the species over survival of the self. We can say no to nature and form a conspiracy of doves. We are uniquely capable of morality, therefore we must be moral. That is our nature.

Everything comes from everything and nothing escapes commonality. I am building a house already built, you are bearing a child already born. Everything comes from everything: a single cell out of another single cell; the cherry tree blossoms from the boughs; the hunter's aim from his arm; the rivers from tributaries from streams from falls from springs from wells; the Christ thorns out of the honey locust; a word from an ancient word, this book from many books; the tiny black bears out of their durable mothers tumbling from dark lairs; eightieth-generation wild crab abloom again and again and again; your hand out of your father's; firstborn out of firstborn out of firstborn out of; the weeping willows and the heart leaf, the Carolina, the silky, the upland, the sandbar willows; every tart berry; our work, which disappears; our mothers' whispers, which disappear; every Thoroughbred; every violet; every kindling twig, bone out of bone; also the heat lightborne, the pollen airborne, the rabbits soft and crickets all angles and the glossy snakes from their slithering, inexhaustible mothers, freshly terrible. When you die, you will contribute your bones like alms. More and more is the only law.

If you’re in America and you think Jesus was white, then I’m here to tell you today, you don’t understand the cross and you don’t understand the color. If they string you up, if they hang you from a big old tree, if they ASSASSINATE you in the name of your brothers, then: You. Are. Black. Abraham Lincoln? Cracker most his days, black in the end. Young Brother Emmett? Black. All them dead Jewboys scattered through the Southland? Even them, black. Reverend King? Black. Malcolm? Black. JFK? Black.

Only an animal visibly damages its mate.

Sanity begins with knowing your place.

The old poets knew all along: the wilderness has an awful tongue, which teaches doubt.

We founded this nation under the illusory notion of independence, that a man’s life is entirely distinct from the life of his neighbor; that the poisons in his water have no bearing on the cleanliness of his neighbor’s water; that the suffering of a laborer has no direct relationship to the purchaser of goods; that animals are objects for sale; that the health of the land is divorced from the health of the collective. We’ve turned freedom from tyranny into freedom from each other.

What she was coming to realize, but what no woman was allowed to utter aloud, was that there was no guarantee your child would be adequate compensation for the life you gave up to have it. More and more, life looked an awful lot like a hoax perpetrated on women and designated to further men’s lives at the expense of their own.