Ishmael Reed > Quotes

“No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.”
― Ishmael Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down

“I had no systematic way of learning but proceeded like a quilt maker, a patch of knowledge here a patch there but lovingly knitted. I would hungrily devour the intellectual scraps and leftovers of the learned.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“Tea Party members go to meetings on Medicare scooters.”
― Ishmael Reed

“All art must be for the end of liberating the masses. A landscape is only good when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree.”
― Ishmael Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down

“Dualism::In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
I am outside of history. i wish i had some peanuts, it looks hungry there in the cage.
i am outside of history. its hungrier than i thot.”
― Ishmael Reed, New and Collected Poems, 1964-2006

“Fear stalks the land. (As usual; so what else is new?)”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“Dance is the universal art, the common joy of expression. Those who cannot dance are imprisoned in their own ego and cannot live well with other people and the world. They have lost the tune of life. They only live in cold thinking. Their feelings are deeply repressed while they attach themselves forlornly to the earth.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

“He said he felt like the gut heart and lungs of Africa’s interior. He said he felt like the Kongo: “Land of the Panther.” He said he felt like “deserting his master,” as the Kongo is “prone to do.” He said he felt he could dance on a dime.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

“But what have Cortes and Pizarro or the others to do with me?

You carry them in your blood as I carry the blood of Montezume; expeditions of them are harbored by your heart and your mind carries their supply trains. You've changed your helmet for a frontier hat while I have changed my robes for overalls and a black leather jacket. The costumes may have changed but the blood is still the same, gringo.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“Orthodoxy is my Doxy, Heterodoxy is the other fellow’s Doxy.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

“democracy and freedom began bouncing all over the world
like bad checks”
― Ishmael Reed, New and Collected Poems, 1964-2006

“Neo-Hoodoo is the 8 basic dances of 19th century New Orleans' Place Congo- the Calinda the Bamboula the Chacta the Babouille the Conjaille the Juba the Congo and the VooDoo- modernized into the Philly Dog, the Hully Gully, the Funky Chicken, the Popcorn, the Boogaloo and the dance of great American choreographer Buddy Bradley. ”
― Ishmael Reed

“What is the American fetish about highways?
They want to get somewhere, LaBas offers.
Because something is after them, Black Herman adds.
But what is after them?
They are after themselves. They call it destiny. Progress.”
― Ishmael Reed

“Have you ever seen people line up outside a Van Gogh exhibit? When they get inside there are so many they can't even see the paintings, they just pass by like sheep or like mourners passing the tomb of a fallen hero, a bier, with the same solemnity. And the extent of their knowledge concerning Van Gogh is that he "cut off his ear." Man, it's religion they make it into.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“Yes. You see, it’s not 1 of those germs that break bleed suck gnaw or devour. It’s nothing we can bring into focus or categorize; once we call it 1 thing it forms into something else.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

“If Orwell had a chance to write 1984 from the vantage point of 1984 instead of 1948, perhaps he would have seen the class of hackers instead of the proles as a threat to Big Brother's rule.”
― Ishmael Reed, Writin' Is Fightin': Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper

“America is the smart-aleck adolescent who’s “been around” and has his own hot rod.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

“Time is a pendulum. Not a river. More akin to what goes around comes around.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“61 lynchings occurred in 1920 alone. In 1921, 62, some of the victims, soldiers returning from the Great War who after fighting and winning significant victories - just as they had fought in the Revolutionary and Civil wars and the wars again the Indians - thought that America would repay them for the generosity of putting their lives on the line, for aiding in salvaging their hides from the Kaiser who had been tagged "enemy" this time. Instead, a Protestant country ignorant even of Western mysteries executes soldiers after a manner of punishments dealt to witches in the "Middle Ages." Europe and the Catholic Church are horrified but not surprised at this "tough guy" across the waters whose horrendous murders in Salem led Europe to reform its "witch laws.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“I think that when people like you , Mr. Von Vampton, say "The Negro Experience" you are saying that all Negroes experience the world the same way. In that way you can isolate the misfits who would propel them into penetrating the ceiling of this bind you and your assistants have established in this country. The ceiling above which no slave would be allowed to penetrate without stirring the kept bloodhounds.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“When I returned from Paris, I dropped out of high school and went to work in Grosvenor Library, where I read work by James Baldwin. But it took years for me to discard the myths imposed upon me by an Anglocentric education and popular culture.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“To some if you owned your own mind you were indeed sick but when you possessed an Atonist mind you were healthy. A mind which sought to interpret the world by using a single loa. Somewhat like filling a milk bottle with an ocean.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“the Thing has stirred in its moorings. The Thing that my Grandfather Harry and his generation of Harrys had thought was nothing but a false alarm.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

“Americans will not tolerate wars that can’t be explained in simple terms of economics or the White man’s destiny.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“I'm just 1 man. Not Faust nor the Kaiser nor the Ku Klux Klan. I am an individual, not a whole tribe or nation.

That's what I'm counting on. But if there is such a thing as a racial soul, a piece of Faust the mountebank residing in a corner of the White man' mind, then we are doomed. It always seems that we talk to the many and then the few and the we are down to 1 man and just as the war between the races is about to begin that 1 man becomes a few and then the many until the next time around and we turn our back on 1 another before the whole procedure begins again. Perhaps 1 day it will be the many and stay there.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“We will leap tall couplets in a single bound”
― Ishmael Reed

“He is summoned and asked to swear upon the only book the judge will allow in "his court." PaPa LaBas won't dare touch the accursed thing. He demands the right to his own idols and books. It reminds PaPa LaBas of the familiar epigram: "Orthodoxy is my Doxy, Heterodoxy is the other fellow's Doxy.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

“This morning. We got reports from down here that people were doing “stupid sensual things,” were in a state of “uncontrollable frenzy,” were wriggling like fish, doing something called the “Eagle Rock” and the “Sassy Bump”; were cutting a mean “Mooche,” and “lusting after relevance.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel

“back off from this poem
it is a greedy mirror
you are into this poem from the waist down
nobody can hear you can they ?
this poem has had you up to here.”
― Ishmael Reed, New and Collected Poems, 1964-2006

“African-American writers with an independent vision are often consigned to obscurity. The white critics can only tolerate one black writer at a time, usually someone who subscribes to their values, and the black critics demand that they respect the official cultural trend of the moment.”
― Ishmael Reed, Black No More