Black Stuff Gown

Famous quotes containing the words black, stuff and/or gown:

    “I respect the ways of old folks, but the blood of a rooster or a goat cannot turn the seasons, change the course of the clouds and fill them up with water like bladders. The other night, at the ceremony for Legba, I danced and sang my fill: I am a black man, no? and I enjoyed it like a true Negro should. When the drums beat, I feel it in the pit of my stomach, I feel the itch in my hips and up and down my legs, I have got to join the party. But that is all.”
    —Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)

    “I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust,... confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of,—sitting there now at three o’clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o’clock in the morning.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “Find out the peaceful hermitage,
    The hairy gown and mossy cell,
    Where I may sit and rightly spell
    Of every star that heaven doth show,
    And every herb that sips the dew;
    Till old experience do attain
    To something like prophetic strain.
    These pleasures Melancholy give,
    And I with thee will choose to live.”
    —John Milton (1608–1674)