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White Christians have also forgotten several elementary historical details. They have forgotten that the religion that is now identified with their virtue and their power – ‘God is on our side,’ says Dr Verwoerd – came out of a rocky piece of ground in what is now known as the Middle East before colour was invented, and that in order for the Christian church to be established, Christ had to be put to death, by Rome, and that the real architect of the Christian church was not the disreputable, sun-baked Hebrew who gave it his name but the mercilessly fanatical and self-righteous St Paul. The energy that was buried with the rise of the Christian nations must come back into the world; nothing can prevent it. Many of us, I think, both long to see this happen and are terrified of it, for though this transformation contains the hope of liberation, it also imposes a necessity for great change. But in order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to re-examine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long.

— The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

In spite of the Puritan-Yankee equation of virtue with well-being, Negroes had excellent reasons for doubting that money was made or kept by any very striking adherence to the Christian virtues; it certainly did not work that way for black Christians.

— The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

Perhaps (I hypothesised freely) the Prophet believed that the fifteen people who inhabited my Halls should be counted as one set of People, while in the Far Distant Halls there lived another set and he ought to be counted as one of them. Perhaps among his own People he was the Third Person or the Tenth. Perhaps he was even some dizzyingly high number like the Seventy-Fifth Person!

But I digress into what is surely fantasy.

— Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

I owe so much to the Other’s generosity. Without him I would not sleep snug and warm in my sleeping bag in Winter. I would not have notebooks in which to record my thoughts.

That being said, it occurs to me to wonder why it is that the House gives a greater variety of objects to the Other than to me, providing him with sleeping bags, shoes, plastic bowls, cheese sandwiches, notebooks, slices of Christmas cake etc., etc., whereas me it mostly gives fish.

— Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Birds are not difficult to understand. Their behaviour tells me what they are thinking. Generally it runs along the lines of: Is this food? Is this? What about this? This might be food. I am almost certain that this is. Or occasionally: It is raining. I do not like it.

— Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Since the World began it is certain that there have existed fifteen people. Possibly there have been more; but I am a scientist and must proceed according to the evidence. Of the fifteen people whose existence is verifiable, only Myself and the Other are now living.

— Piranesi by Susanna Clarke