Love

Love is not thought. Love is not desire, love is not pleasure, love is not the movement of images, and as long as you have images about another, there is no love. And we ask, is it possible to live a life without a single image? Then you have a relationship with each other. As it is, it is like two parallel lines never meeting, except sexually. A man goes off to the office, ambitious, greedy, envious, trying to achieve a position in the business world, in the religious world, in the professional world, and the modern lady also goes off to the office, and they meet in their house to breed children. And then the whole problem of responsibility, problem of education, of total indifference, comes. It does not matter then what your children are, what happens to them. You want them to be like you—safely married, with a house, a job, etc. Right? This is our life, daily life, and it is really a sorrowful life. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Baldwin

But no one touched her; no one spoke. She drank her coffee, sitting in the strong sun that fell through the window. Now it came to her how alone, how frightened she was; she had never been so frightened in her life before. She knew that she was pregnant—knew it, as the old folks said, in her bones; and if Richard should be sent away, what, under heaven, could she do? Two years, three years—she had no idea how long he might be sent away for—what would she do? And how could she keep her aunt from knowing? And if her aunt should find out, then her father would know, too. The tears welled up, and she drank her cold, tasteless coffee. And what would they do with Richard? And if they sent him away, what would he be like, then, when he returned? She looked out into the quiet, sunny streets, and for the first time in her life, she hated it all—the white city, the white world. She could not, that day, think of one decent white person in the whole world. She sat there, and she hoped that one day God, with tortures inconceivable, would grind them utterly into humility, and make them know that black boys and black girls, whom they treated with such condescension, such disdain, and such good humor, had hearts like human beings, too, more human hearts than theirs.

But Richard was not sent away… there was no evidence on which to convict him. The courtroom seemed to feel, with some complacency and some disappointment, that it was his great good luck to be left off so easily. They went immediately to his room. And there—she was never all her life long to forget it—he threw himself, face downward, on his bed and wept.

She had only seen one other man weep before—her father—and it had not been like this. She touched him, but he did not stop. Her own tears fell on his dirty, uncombed hair. She tried to hold him, but for a long while he would not be held. His body was like iron; she could find no softness in it. She sat curled like a frightened child on the edge of the bed, her hand on his back, waiting for the storm to pass over. It was then that she decided not to tell him yet about the child.

By and by he called her name. And then he turned, and she held him against her breast, while he sighed and shook. He fell asleep at last, clinging to her as though he were going down into the water for the last time.

And it was the last time. That night he cut his wrists with his razor and he was found in the morning by his landlady, his eyes staring upward with no light, dead among the scarlet sheets.

Gravity's Rainbow

Those drab undershorts of his are full to bursting with need humorlessly, worldly to use [young womens'] innocence, to write on them new words of himself, his own brown realpolitik dreams, some psychic prostate ever in aching love promised, ah hinted but till now … how seductively they lie ranked in their iron bedsteads, their virginal sheets, the darlings so artlessly erotic…