Cole > Cole's Quotes

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Those of us who attempt to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening our own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. We will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of our own obsessions, our aggressivity, our ego-centered ambitions, our delusions about ends and means.”
― Thomas Merton

“Whiteness is not only false and oppressive, it is nothing but false and oppressive.”
― David R. Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History

“All my skinfolk ain't kinfolk”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“Cry about one thing in life, cry about all; one thread runs through the whole piece.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“Unless we develop some cohesive vision of that world in which we hope these children will participate, and some sense of our own responsibilities in the shaping of that world, we will only raise new performers in the master’s sorry drama.”
― Audre Lorde

“Ah ain't got tuh do but two things--stay black and die," Sister Berry snapped.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“as social conditions change, so must the knowledge and practices designed to resist them”
― Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment

“Writing for me is thinking, and it’s also a way to position myself in the world, particularly when I don’t like what’s going on. It’s extremely important to me. ... I knew I always was compelled to do it, but I didn’t know how essential it was to me.”
― Toni Morrison

“Prison abolition means … rejecting the idea that harm is criminal, and, instead, assuming that everyone causes harm — some more than others, when not given what they need to effectively prevent their own harm.”
― Camonghne Felix

“I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

“No, I do not weep at the world. I'm too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings

“You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“I want to do good work. I want to be involved in other people's doing good work.”
― Toni Morrison

“No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Big talk ain’t changin’ whut you doin’. You can’t clean yo’ self wid yo’ tongue lak uh cat.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah's Gourd Vine

“The abolitionists study whiteness in order to abolish it—not to “reframe,” or “redeem,” or “deconstruct” it but to abolish it.”
― Noel Ignatiev

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
― Arundhati Roy

“Instead of asking whether anyone should be locked up or go free, why don’t we think about why we solve problems by repeating the kind of behavior that brought us the problem in the first place?”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore

“Lot’s wife lookee back and turn to a pillar of salt and she be dere till Judgment Day. Poor Cudjo, I no lookee back. I pressee forward.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"

“[A]nd soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.”
― Lucille Clifton

“Abolition is not some disstant future but something we create in every moment when we say no to the traps of empire and yes to the nourishing possibilities dreamed of and practiced by our ancestors and friends. Every time we insist on accessible and affirming health care, safe and quality education, meaningful and secure employment, loving and healing relationships, and being our full and whole selves, we are doing abolition. Abolition is about breaking down things that oppress and building up things that nourish. Abolition is the practice of transformation in the here and now and the ever after.”
― Eric A. Stanley, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex

“Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me-so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“...practice makes different.”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore

“All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity.”
― bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism

“The prisons in the United States had long been an extreme reflection of the American system itself: the stark life differences between rich and poor, the racism, the use of victims against one another, the lack of resources of the underclass to speak out, the endless "reforms" that changed little. Dostoevski once said: "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."

It had long been true, and prisoners knew this better than anyone, that the poorer you were the more likely you were to end up in jail. This was not just because the poor committed more crimes. In fact, they did. The rich did not have to commit crimes to get what they wanted; the laws were on their side. But when the rich did commit crimes, they often were not prosecuted, and if they were they could get out on bail, hire clever lawyers, get better treatment from judges. Somehow, the jails ended up full of poor black people.”
― Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present