M. > M.'s Quotes

“You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress ... No matter how much respect, no matter how much recognition, whites show towards me, as far as I am concerned, as long as it is not shown to everyone of our people in this country, it doesn't exist for me.”
― Malcolm X

“I went to the shoemaker to collect his wastepaper. One of them asked me if my book was communistic. I replied that it was realistic. He cautioned me that it was not wise to write of reality.”
― Carolina Maria de Jesus, Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, 50th Anniversary Edition

“The book is man's best invention so far.”
― Carolina Maria de Jesus

“Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystalize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days. It is silent and elusive, refusing to be damned and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the conciousness at ragged, unexpected intervals. ”
― Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place

“Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over.”
― Gloria Naylor

“Time is a funny thing. I was always puzzled with the way a single day could stretch itself out to the point of eternity in your mind, all while years melted down into the fraction of a second.”
― Gloria Naylor, Mama Day

“Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.”
― Toni Morrison, Jazz

“Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder.
And I the eye of the storm.”
― Toni Morrison, Jazz

“the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)”
― Toni Morrison, Jazz

“What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?”
― Toni Morrison, Jazz

“I was so sure it would happen. That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle.”
― Toni Morrison, Jazz

“Home. It's being new and old all rolled into one. Measuring your new against old friends, old ways, old places, Knowing that as long as the old survives, you can keep changing as much as you want without the nightmare of waking up to a total stranger.”
― Gloria Naylor, Mama Day

“I was so busy enjoying the change in you, I didn't notice it in myself.”
― Gloria Naylor, Mama Day

“When you raise a god instead of a child, you're bound to be serving him for the rest of your days. Same thing holds when you marry a god.”
― Gloria Naylor, Mama Day

“She ain't gotta worry about going on to hell. Hell was right now. Daddy always said that folks misread the Bible. Couldn't be no punishment worse than having to live here on earth, he said.”
― Gloria Naylor, Mama Day

“The music in his laughter had a way of rounding off the missing notes in her soul.”
― Gloria Naylor, Linden Hills

“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time: Mcdougal Littell Literature Connections

“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“In short, his entire life became a race against the natural—and he was winning.”
― Gloria Naylor, Linden Hills

“It is quite possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is to find himself, at length, with nothing to be articulate about. ("You taught me language," says Caliban to Prospero, "and my profit on't is I know how to curse.")”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”
― Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

“Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear.”
― Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

“When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”
― Desmond Tutu

“We learn from history that we don't learn from history!”
― Desmond Tutu