Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 78
Context: Tolstoy deplored all the modern tendencies toward immense congregations of people in limited areas, on the ground that they were making more and more impossible the truly Christian life. In cities the rich find little restraint to their lusts, while the lusts of the poor are greater there than in the country, and they satisfy them up to the limit of their means. In the country, Tolstoy could still see the possibility of men living a Christian life; in the cities he saw no such possibility. Cities had therefore to be uprooted and destroyed. The people had to get back to the soil.
“From far beyond the horizons that bound this bleak plantation there had come to me through my living the knowledge that my father was a black peasant who had gone to the city seeking life, but who had failed in the city; a black peasant whose life had been hopelessly snarled in the city, and who had at last fled the city—that same city which had lifted me in its burning arms and borne me toward alien and undreamed of shores of knowing.”
Black Boy (1945)
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Richard Wright 130
African-American writer 1908–1960Related quotes
“Seven cities warred for Homer being dead,
Who living had no roofe to shrowd his head.”
Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells (1635). Compare: "Homer himself must beg if he want means, and as by report sometimes he did 'go from door to door and sing ballads, with a company of boys about him", Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Part i. Sect. 2, Memb. 4, Subsect. 6.
1980s, Second term of office (1985–1989), Farewell Address (1989)
Source: The Walking Drum (1984), Ch. 31
On how being a city planner affects her writing in “Questions For Arkady Martine, Author Of 'A Memory Called Empire'” https://www.npr.org/2019/04/07/710356506/questions-for-arkady-martine-author-of-a-memory-called-empire in NPR (2019 Apr 7)