Toni Cade Bambara > Quotes

“As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara

“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?… Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.”
― Toni Cade Bambara , The Salt Eaters

“Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.”
― Toni Cade Bambara

“(M)aybe we too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect . . . you know . . . like being people.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, Raymond's Run

“Write a lot and hit the streets. A writer who doesn't keep up with what's out there ain't gonna be out there.”
― Toni Cade Bambara

“Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion. I’ve seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges. I’ve felt them doing it. Words conjure. I try not to be careless about what I utter, write, sing. I’m careful about what I give voice to.”
― Toni Cade Bambara

“I am one beautiful and powerful son of a bitch,' he told himself. 'Smart as a whip, respected, prosperous, beloved and valuable. I have the right to be healthy, happy and rich, for I am the baddest player in this arena or any other. I love myself more than I love money and pretty women and fine clothes. I love myself more than I love neat gardens and healthy babies and a good gospel choir. I love myself as I love The Law. I love myself in error and in correctness, waking or sleeping, sneezing, tipsy, or fabulously brilliant I love myself doing the books or sitting down to a good game of poker. I love myself making love expertly, or tenderly and shyly, or clumsily and inept. I love myself as I love The Master's Mind,' he continued his litany, having long ago stumbled upon the prime principle as a player--that self-love produces the gods and the gods are genius. It took genius to run the Southwest Community Infirmary. So he made the rounds of his hospital the way he used to make the rounds of his houses to keep the tops spinning, reciting declarations of self-love.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“The dream is real, my friends. The failure to make it work is the unreality.”
― Toni Cade Bambara

“Not all speed is movement.”
― Toni Cade Bambara

“For people sometimes believed that it was safer to live with complaints,
was necessary to cooperate with grief, was all right to become an accomplice in self-ambush...
Take heart to flat out decide to be well and stride into the future sane and whole.”
― Toni Cade Bambara

“We stand there with this big smile of respect between us. It’s about as real a smile as girls can do for each other, considering we don’t practice real smiling every day, you know, cause maybe we too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect . . . you know . . . like being people.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, Raymond's Run

“… got to give it all up, the pain, the hurt, the anger and make room for lovely things to rush in and fill you full.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion.”
― Toni Cade Bambara

“Writing is a legitimate way, an important way, to participate in the empowerment of the community that names me.”
― Toni Cade Bambara

“If your house ain't in order, you ain't in order. It is so much easier to be out there than in here.”
― Toni Cade Bambara

“So used to being unwhole and unwell, one forgot what it was to walk upright and see clearly, breathe easily, think better than was taught, be better than one was programmed to believe—so concentration was necessary to help a neighbor experience the best of herself or himself. For people sometimes believed that it was safer to live with complaints, was necessary to cooperate with grief, was all right to become an accomplice in self-ambush.”

Excerpt From: Toni Cade Bambara. “The Salt Eaters.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“Keep the focus on the action not the institution; don’t confuse the vehicle with the objective; all cocoons are temporary and disappear”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“The limits of binary thinking are spooky enough”
― Toni Cade Bambara, Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations

“Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.”

― Toni Cade Bambara, born #OTD in 1939”
― Toni Cade Bambara

“Two hundred pounds of grief and heft if she was one-fifty. Bless her heart, just a babe of the times. Wants to be smiling and feeling good all the time. Smooth sailing as they lower the mama into the ground. Then there’s you. What’s your story?”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“Cause love won’t let you let’m go.” “But they want to go, that’s the hurting part.” “Like you tole the lap sitter this morning, Min, when you hurt, hurt. But when you see the chirren calling down thunder and going up in flames, Min. Why then you snatch you a blanket”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“It is a noble thing, the rearing of warriors for the revolution. I can find no fault with the idea. I do, however, find fault with the notion that dumping pills is the way to do it. You don't prepare yourself for the raising of super-people by making yourself vulnerable - chance fertilization, chance support, chance tomorrow - nor by being celibate until you stumble across the right stock to breed with. You prepare yourself by being healthy and confident, by having options that give you confidence, by getting yourself together, by being together enough to attract a together cat whose notions of fatherhood rise above the Disney caliber of man-in-the-world-and-woman-in-the-home, by being committed to the new consciousness, by being intellectually and spiritually and financially self-sufficient to do the thing right. You prepare yourself by being in control of yourself. The pill gives the woman, as well as the man, some control. Simple as that.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Black Woman: An Anthology

“Silence. Stillness. To give her soul a chance to attend to its own affairs at its own level.”
― Toni Cade Bambara

“Anywhere at all in the universe, but I choose to be here with this growler scowler. And good ain’t the key. It’s just that I’m available to any and every adventure of the human breath.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“You don't logic, man. You sheer don't logic.”
― Toni Cade Bambara

“there is an alternative wing in this country that is devoted to the notion of socially responsible cinema, that is interested in exploring the potential of cinema for social transformation, and these practitioners continue to struggle to tell the American story. That involves assuming the enormous tasks of reconstructing cultural memory, of revitalizing usable traditions of cultural practices, and of resisting the wholesale and unacknowledged appropriation of cultural items—such as music, language style, posture—by the industry that then attempts to suppress the roots of it—where it came from—in order to sustain its ideological hegemony. And so, there is no single American reality. There are versions, perspectives, that are specific to the historical experiences and cultural heritages of various communities in this country.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations

“So I deal in straight-up fiction myself, cause I value my family and friends, and mostly cause I lie a lot anyway.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, Gorilla, My Love

“But she would not break her discipline to comfort herself in a shallow way. Would no more break discipline with her Self than she would her covenant with God.”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“That's the problem with friends sometimes, they invest in who you were or seem to have been, capture you and you're through. Forget what you had in mind about changing, growing, developing. Got you typecasted.”
― Toni Cade Bambara

“We are involved in a struggle for liberation: liberation from the exploitive and dehumanizing system of racism, from the manipulative control of a corporate society; liberation from the constrictive norms of 'mainstream' culture, from the synthetic myths that encourage us to fashion ourselves rashly from the without (reaction), instead of the within (creation).”
― Toni Cade Bambara, The Black Woman: An Anthology