Wallace Thurman > Quotes

“I am reminded again that the greatest phrase ever written is words, words, words.”
― Wallace Thurman

“I cannot bear to associate with the ordinary run of people. I have to surround myself with individuals who for the most part are more than a trifle insane”
― Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring

“It was the way of Emma Lou always to create her worlds within her own mind without taking under consideration the fact that other people and other elements, not contained within herself, would also have to aid in their molding.”
― Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry...

“Perhaps if she were to live with a homey type of family they could introduce her to “the right sort of people.”
― Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry

“Beloved, we join hands here to pray for gin. An aridity defiles us. Our innards thirst for the juice of juniper. Something must be done. The drought threatens to destroy us. Surely, God who let manna fall from the heavens so that the holy children of Israel might eat, will not let the equally holy children of Niggeratti Manor die from the want of a little gin. Children, let us pray.”
― Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring

“Their motto must be “Whiter and whiter every generation,” until the grandchildren of the blue veins could easily go over into the white race and become assimilated so that problems of race would plague them no more.”
― Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry

“You see, people have to feel superior to something, and there is scant satisfaction in feeling superior to domestic animals or steel machines that one can train or utilize. It is much more pleasing to pick out some individual or some group of individuals on the same plane to feel superior to.”
― Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life: A Library of America eBook Classic

“didn’t matter if you and your parents had been freedmen before the Emancipation Proclamation, nor did it matter that you were almost three-quarters white. You were, nevertheless, classed with those hordes of hungry, ragged, ignorant black folk arriving from the South in such great numbers, packed like so many stampeding cattle in dirty, manure-littered box cars.”
― Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life: A Library of America eBook Classic

“too busy in this respect to be violently aroused by problems of race unless economic factors precipitated matters.”
― Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry . . .