War & Peace Quote by Gregory Corso

Corso’s “lucky thing” lands like a bitter joke: luck, here, isn’t talent or timing, but the accident of being legible to a tribe. The line comes out of an America where “Italian” could mean target first, citizen second, and where the street-level economy of respect ran on quick calculations about who was protected and who was alone. Corso frames ethnicity less as heritage than as a switch that flips the crowd from spectators to participants.

The key move is “saw me fight back.” Defense isn’t granted automatically; it’s triggered by performance. Corso suggests solidarity is conditional, even transactional: prove you won’t fold, and the group will invest in you. That’s both bracing and bleak. It punctures the sentimental version of community and replaces it with something closer to a neighborhood physics: momentum attracts mass. The “other Italians” don’t arrive because injustice has occurred; they arrive because courage has been demonstrated.

As a Beat-era poet with a biography marked by institutionalization, hustling, and working-class New York, Corso often wrote from inside the machinery that makes outsiders. This line carries that insider’s realism: identity can be armor, but it’s armor you only get to wear if you can take a hit first. Under the gratitude is an indictment of a society where protection depends on whether your people recognize you, and where recognition depends on whether you look tough enough to be worth defending.