Avi > Avi's Quotes

“When you play a game of thrones you win or you die.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“You know how sometimes you lie in bed at night and think, “What if the law of gravity just wears out and lets go and I drift into space?” Does that ever make you anxious?”
― Elaine May

“She not black, she mulatto. Mulatto, mulatto, mulatto. Maybe she be family to both and to hurt white man just as bad as hurting black man…..Maybe if she start to think that she not black or white, then she won’t have to care about neither man’s affairs. Maybe if she don’t care what other people think she be and start think about what she think she be, maybe she can rise over backra and nigger business, since neither ever mean her any good. Since the blood that run through her both black and white, maybe she be her own thing. But what thing she be?”
― Marlon James, The Book of Night Women

“Denial makes people repeat what they aren’t willing to acknowledge.”
― Daniel Black, Perfect Peace

“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“I have known the joy and pain of friendship. I have served and been served. I have made some good enemies for which I am not a bit sorry. I have loved unselfishly, and I have fondled hatred with the red-hot tongs of Hell. That's living.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“Two things everybody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“You heard me. You ain't blind.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“You'se something tuh make uh man forgit to git old and forgit tuh die.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“His soul,' she would say, 'picked mine up and we flew.' And to those who gave her a disbelieving look, she would insist. 'Have you never touched someone and felt them? Felt what was inside of their body?' Only a few would know what she was talking about.”
― Marie-Elena John, Unburnable

“My friend Ian Hagemann, a regular at Wiscon, once said on a panel that when he reads science fiction futures that are full of white people and no one else, he wonders when the race war happened that wiped out the majority of the human race, and why the writer hasn’t mentioned such an important plot point.”
― Nalo Hopkinson

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”
― Lloyd Alexander

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“When someone shows you who they are believe them the first time.”
― Maya Angelou

“Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.”
― Maya Angelou, Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women

“A woman's heart should be so hidden in God that a man has to seek Him just to find her.”
― Maya Angelou

“Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.”
― Maya Angelou

“While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God's creation.”
― Maya Angelou

“Here's all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.”
― George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops?

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.”
― Dr. Seuss

“Avoid teams at all cost. Keep your circle small. Never join a group that has a name.”
― George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?

“[A] quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business."

(The Record Lie)”
― A.A. Milne, If I May

“If the person you are talking to doesn't appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.”
― Joan Powers, Pooh's Little Instruction Book

“There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to go--if there are no doors or windows--he walks through a wall.”
― Bernard Malamud

“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”
― Logan Pearsall Smith

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”
― Rebecca West