LITERALLY DC > LITERALLY 's Quotes

“I can't change where I come from or what I've been through, so why should I be ashamed of what makes me, me?”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“It's dope to be black until it's hard to be black.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“Yet when his classmates put their blades to a colored cadaver, they did more for the cause of colored advancement than the most high-minded abolitionist. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man’s equal.”
― Colson Whitehead , The Underground Railroad

“If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn't be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it'd still be his. If the white man wasn't destined to take this new world, he wouldn't own it now.

Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor--if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“If you don't like my story,write your own”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.”
― Dalai Lama XIV, The Art of Happiness

“Although you may not always be able to avoid difficult situations,you can modify the extent to which you can suffer by how you choose to respond to the situation.”
― Dalai Lama XIV, The Art of Happiness

“But we all know that the seeds of greatness grow faster in the hearts of those doing work they love than in the bitter hearts of those enslaved by work they despise.”
― Brendon Burchard, The Motivation Manifesto: 9 Declarations to Claim Your Personal Power

“Without making the actual attempt, without trial and strife, there can be no true knowledge, no progress, no high achievement, and no legend.”
― Brendon Burchard, The Motivation Manifesto: 9 Declarations to Claim Your Personal Power

“Are you not more than your tiny worries about inconvenience? Isn’t a better life worth some struggle?”
― Brendon Burchard, The Motivation Manifesto: 9 Declarations to Claim Your Personal Power

“We must overcome social- and self-oppression if we are ever to join the ranks of the free souls who love their lives and lead their people.”
― Brendon Burchard, The Motivation Manifesto: 9 Declarations to Claim Your Personal Power

“She was poised and sympathetic, like a girl who'd just come from the future but didn't want to brag about it.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“You don't know what's happening on the other side of the wall, because you don't want to know.”
― James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro

“Their dark skin, their gender, their economic status--none of those were acceptable excuses for not giving the fullest rein to their imaginations and ambitions.”
― Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures

“Their path to advancement might look less like a straight line and more like some of the pressure distributions and orbits they plotted, but they were determined to take a seat at the table.”
― Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures

“Women, on the other hand, had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations.”
― Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures

“Or maybe it was her father's pragmatic dictum -- "You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you"-- that disposed her to see the hardships of her life as a fate shared by everyone, her good fortunes as an unearned blessing.”
― Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures

“I changed what I could, and what I couldn't, I endured.”
― Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures

“No one is really going to help you or give you direction. In fact, the odds are against you.”
― Robert Greene, Mastery

“Become who you are by learning who you are.”
― Robert Greene, Mastery

“We tried to outpace the thing that chased us, that said: You are nothing. We tried to ignore it, but sometimes we caught ourselves repeating what history said, mumbling along, brainwashed: I am nothing. We drank too much, smoked too much, were abusive to ourselves, to each other. We were bewildered. There is a great darkness bearing down on our lives, and no one acknowledges it.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir

“Life is a hurricane, and we board up to save what we can and bow low to the earth to crouch in that small space above the dirt where the wind will not reach. We honor anniversaries of deaths by cleaning graves and sitting next to them before fires, sharing food with those who will not eat again. We raise children and tell them other things about who they can be and what they are worth: to us, everything. We love each other fiercely, while we live and after we die. We survive; we are savages.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir

“But I am not that eloquent, so I shut my mouth and smile.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir

“Both of us on the cusp of adulthood, and this is how my brother and I understood what it meant to be a woman: working, dour, full of worry. What it meant to be a man: resentful, angry, wanting life to be everything but what it was.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir

“Men’s bodies litter my family history. The pain of the women they left behind pulls them from the beyond, makes them appear as ghosts. In death, they transcend he circumstances of this place that I love and hate all at once and become supernatural.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir

“own, did that mean we were living the same story over and over again, down through the generations? That the young and Black had always been dying, until all that was left were children and the few old, as in war?”
― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir