Lillian E. Smith > Quotes

“When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking questions, always new question, then it is time to die”
― lillian smith

“Those faces on Main Street shaded by wide straw hats are surrounded in my child-memory by hardware and ploughs, seed bags and bales of cotton, the smell of guano and mule lots, hot sun on sidewalks and lovely white ladies with sweet childlike voices and smooth childlike faces, and Old gardens of boxwood and camellias, and fields endlessly curving around my small world. I know now that the bitterness, the cruel sensual lips, the quick fears in hard eyes, the sashshaying buttocks of brown girls, the thin childish voices of white women, had a great deal to do with high interest at the bank and low wages in the mills and gullied fields and lynchings and Ku Klux Klan and segregation and sacred womanhood and revivals, and Prohibition. And that no part of this memory can be understood without recalling it all of it.”
― Lillian Smith

“The human heart dares not stay away from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.”
― Lillian E. Smith, Killers of the Dream

“To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives...”
― Lillian Smith

“I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.”
― Lillian E. Smith

“They are trying to hold on to a world that no longer exists. They are blind and terrified because they feel it slipping away from them. They are gripping thin air but they keep trying desperately to hold on to it - hoping the air will turn into something familiar and solid.”
― Lillian E. Smith, One Hour

“The mother who taught me what I know of tenderness and love and compassion taught me also the bleak rituals of keeping Negroes in their 'place.' The father who rebuked me for an air of superiority toward schoolmates from the mill and rounded out his rebuke by gravely reminding me that 'all men are brothers,' trained me in the steel-rigid decorums I must demand of every colored male. They who so gravely taught me to split my body from my mind and both from my 'soul,' taught me also to split my conscience from my acts and Christianity from southern tradition.”
― Lillian E. Smith, Killers of the Dream

“None but the weak crave to be better than. Strong men are satisfied with their own strength.”
― Lillian Smith

“So we learned the dance that cripples the human spirit, step by step by step, we who were white and we who were colored, day by day, hour by hour, year by year until the movements were reflexes and made for the rest of our life without thinking.”
― Lillian E. Smith, Killers of the Dream

“[The truth] is what actually happens. Not what you want to happen. Not what you're afraid will happen. We make up stories when we want things to happen or are afraid they may happen. And sometimes we do it for fun-or to scare people or make them do our way or to hurt them. And sometimes we do it because it's a pretty story and we tell it just as we fly a kite or send balloons floating.”
― Lillian E. Smith, One Hour

“I keep thinking about the fragmented quality of human awareness: You take your blindness for granted most of the time then suddenly it stuns you: how little you see as you plunge ahead from minute to minute, day to day, year to year - vision cut down to the arc of a flickering flashlight, never sure how your words and acts are affecting someone else because you never really see that someone as he is. I know we should find even the most serene life unendurable were we to possess to any real degree those extrasensory perceptions which our grandmothers believed in...”
― Lillian E. Smith, One Hour

“There’s right and there’s wrong. You’ll do right as a doctor, Son, or wrong. There’s no middle road.”
― Lillian E. Smith, Strange Fruit

“How old are you?” “Most thirteen.”
― Lillian E. Smith, Strange Fruit

“boy. Ten million Crazy Carls to be tended and fed and protected from the cruelty which Miss Sadie’s eyes were sharp enough to see lay in white men’s breasts.”
― Lillian E. Smith, Strange Fruit

“It was all a little vague to her, but sleeping together, cold weather or hot, seemed a necessary thread in the fabric of marriage, which, once broken, might cause the whole thing to unravel.”
― Lillian E. Smith, Strange Fruit

“That’s the South’s trouble. Ignorant. Doesn’t know anything. Doesn’t even know what’s happening outside in the world! Shut itself up with its trouble and its ignorance until the two together have gnawed the sense out of it. Believes world was created in six days. Believes white man was created by God to rule the world. As soon believe a nigger was as good as a white man as to believe in evolution. All tied up together. Ignorance. Scared of everything about science, except its gadgets. Afraid not to believe in hell, even. Afraid to be free.”
― Lillian E. Smith, Strange Fruit

“Trouble is, you can’t be a Christian in the South. You can’t be one even if you want to, in the setup we’ve got down here! Everybody gouging his living out of somebody beneath him—singing hymns as he gouges—”
― Lillian E. Smith, Strange Fruit

“The human heart does not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.”
― Lillian Smith

“All they did was go to work, come home, go to work. Seemed enough. Enough for niggers in Georgia … sure!”
― Lillian E. Smith, Strange Fruit

“Yes sirree, Sam Perry’s one nigger a college education didn’t ruin.” They listened to Sam. “Sam Perry”
― Lillian E. Smith, Strange Fruit

“Every Southerner knows, of course. We lynch the Negro’s soul every day of our lives.”
― Lillian E. Smith, Strange Fruit

“When you can’t ask a small favor of a son—there’s not much left for a mother.”
― Lillian E. Smith, Strange Fruit