jannat pooler > jannat's Quotes

“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”
― Audre Lorde

“Your silence will not protect you.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
― Audre Lorde

“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

“It seems to me, that this, too, is how memory works. What we remember of what was done to us shapes our view, molds us, sets our stance. But what we remember is past, it no longer exists, and yet we hold on to it, live by it, surrender so much control to it. What do we become when we put down the scripts written by history and memory, when each person before us can be seen free of the cultural or personal narrative we've inherited or devised?
When we, ourselves, can taste that freedom.”
― Rebecca Walker

“. . . when it comes down to it, that’s what life is all about: showing up for the people you love, again and again, until you can’t show up anymore.”
― Rebecca Walker, Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence

“Sex can look like love if you don't know what love looks like.”
― Rebecca Walker

“in life every thing comes with a price even freedom”
― Steven Barnes, The Descent of Anansi

“Funny how all things people don’t understand seem to be ‘cursed’.”
― Nnedi Okorafor, Zahrah the Windseeker

“Flawed, imperfect creatures! That's what we both are, oga! That's what we ALL are!”
― Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death

“i found god in myself
and i loved her
i loved her fiercely”
― Ntozake Shange

“one thing I don’t need
is any more apologies
i got sorry greetin me at my front door
you can keep yrs
i don’t know what to do wit em
they don’t open doors
or bring the sun back
they don’t make me happy
or get a mornin paper
didn’t nobody stop usin my tears to wash cars
cuz a sorry.”
― Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf

“without any assistance or guidance from you
i have loved you assiduously for 8 months 2 wks & a day
i have been stood up four times
i've left 7 packages on yr doorstep
forty poems 2 plants & 3 handmade notecards i left
town so i cd send to you have been no help to me
on my job
you call at 3:00 in the mornin on weekdays
so i cd drive 27 1/2 miles cross the bay before i go to work
charmin charmin
but you are of no assistance
i want you to know
this waz an experiment
to see how selifsh i cd be
if i wd really carry on to snare a possible lover
if i waz capable of debasin my self for the love of another
if i cd stand not being wanted
when i wanted to be wanted
& i cannot
so
with no further assistance & no guidance from you
i am endin this affair

this note is attached to a plant
i've been waterin since the day i met you
you may water it
yr damn self”
― Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf

“Through my tears
I found god in myself
and I loved her fiercely”
― Ntozake Shange

“Ever since I realized there waz someone callt/
a colored girl an evil woman a bitch or a nag/
i been tryin not to be that & leave bitterness/
in somebody else's cup...”
― Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf

“i usedta live in the world
really be in the world
free & sweet talkin
good mornin & thank-you & nice day
uh huh
i cant now
i cant be nice to nobody
nice is such a rip-off
regular beauty & a smile in the street
is just a set-up”
― Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf

“somebody/ anybody
sing a black girl's song
bring her out
to know herself
to know you
but sing her rhythms
carin/ struggle/ hard times
sing her song of life
she's been dead so long
closed in silence so long
she doesn't know the sound
of her own voice
her infinite beauty
she's half-notes scattered
without rhythm/ no tune
sing her sighs
sing the song of her possibilities
sing a righteous gospel
let her be born
let her be born
& handled warmly.”
― Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf

“Where there is a woman there is magic.”
― Ntozake Shange

“And this is for Colored girls who have considered suicide, but are moving to the ends of their own rainbows.”
― Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf

“Where there is a woman there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits.”
― Ntozake Shange, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo

“my spirit is too ancient to understand the separation of soul & gender”
― Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf

“I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life”
― June Jordan, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems

“And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea:

we are the ones we have been waiting for.”
― June Jordan

“and if i
if i ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate i o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.

(from i must become a menace to my enemies)”
― June Jordan, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems

“We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
― June Jordan

“If you are free, you are not predicatable and you are not controllable.”
― June Jordan

“Like running trying to live a good life has to hurt a little bit, or we're not running hard enough, not really trying.”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan

“My heart is not peripheral to me.”
― June Jordan

“When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different ... we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives”
― June Jordan, Passion

“To begin is no more agony than opening your hand.”
― June Jordan