Black Coffee discussion

Ok so I am very very very into quotes. They are life changing for me. With that being said, if you have any favorite quotes or come accross any good ones that you feel you need to tell somebody, put it here please. I really love quotes so share your quotes with us.

Awesome idea, Kisha!

“Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.” - George Burns

I actually mentioned this quote to someone today xD

People say, That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But they are wrong. What doesn't kill you doesn't kill you. That's all you get. Sometimes, you just have to hope that's enough.”
― Tayari Jones

And

Follow your bliss”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

"History is the third parent."
--Nadeem Aslam from The Blind Man's Garden

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."
--Mahatma Gandhi

“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

One of my favs Lulu!

GREAT IDEA HERE KISHA, since I was about 14 I have loved quotes, I'd write down many I loved in journals (and just started a new one).
Now I've never read 'Kindred' by Octavia E Butler (but Kisha knows how much I want to when i can get a copy) bu I found this quote I loved:

“Better to stay alive," I said. "At least while there's a chance to get free." I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.”

I thought that was a spot on and wonderful quote about strength and the human condition.

Of course I have about a billion quotes I truly love (not all have to relate to books/writers)

I'll leave you with this which was said by Elenor Roosevelt which was awesome and I heard it Years ago...

'Women are like tea bags, you don't know how strong they are until they get in hot water" :)

Nice ladies...keep them coming!

Dwelling on small joys is more rewarding than obsessing over little annoyances.

Classics; a book which people praise and don't read -Mark Twain

"When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, we had the Bible in our hand, and they had the land."

-Jomo Kenyatta, Kenyan independence leader

Love that one Jeron!

Thanks, Londa.

“I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”
― Nikki Giovanni

Good one Maya!

“The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes. Then there is the business of surprise. I never know what is coming next. The phrase that sounds in the head changes when it appears on the page. Then I start probing it with a pen, finding new meanings. Sometimes I burst out laughing at what is happening as I twist and turn sentences. Strange business, all in all. One never gets to the end of it. That’s why I go on, I suppose. To see what the next sentences I write will be.” ― Gore Vidal

One of my favorites and appropriate for this time of year. :0)


“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

"Racism crushes spirits, incites divisiveness, and justifies the estrangement of entire groups of individuals who, like all humans, come into the world full of goodness, with a desire to connect, and with boundless capacity to learn and grow. Unless adults understand racism, they will, as I did, unknowingly teach it to their children."
Debby Irving, "Waking Up White"

"There are two things I have a right to - liberty or death. One or the other I mean to have. I shall fight for my liberty."

Sixty-seven years ago, award winning dramatist Richard Durham wrote the dialog lines above for his Independence Day script in 1948 about famed abolitionist and Underground Railroad activist Harriet Tubman.

l love this quote, and if you'd like to read more about Durham's dramatic interpretation of Tubman's legacy for freedom and liberty, please check out my blog post at http://www.sonjadwilliams.com/blog/

“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

To anyone who is "team natural" or is going through the process of remaining or transitioning to natural hair, you will probably love this quote....

“Relaxing your hair is like being in prison. You're caged in. Your hair rules you. You didn't go running with Curt today because you don't want to sweat out this straightness. You're always battling to make your hair do what it wasn't meant to do.”

“The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”
― Lorraine Hansberry

“When I started building my business I had to pay white lawyers to handle all my dealings. Do you think business people here in Kentucky would sell their shops to a black woman? I had to pay extra to put white faces out there handling business for me. You know what? They were happy to take money from my little old black hands. Rich folks get a paved road with flowers growing along the sides. Poor folks get a bumpy, rocky cow path with thorns and thistles that slow them down. That’s just how it is." -Opal Davis, in the book:
When Saigon Surrendered: A Kentucky Mystery

"God has no Religion"

-Mahatma Ghandi

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable." - President John F. Kennedy

"Good morning Revolution:
You are the best friend
I ever had.
We gonna pal around together from now on..."

It goes on and the full poem is linked below, but sometimes those 4 lines are all I need to remind me.

https://theworkersdreadnought.wordpre...

“Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.” --- Marcel Proust

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
-Animal Farm, George Orwell

Londa wrote: "One of my favorites and appropriate for this time of year. :0)


“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led..."

This has a whole new meaning right now, Londa!

“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”
― Nora Ephron

I had put my life in the hands of others and now here I was, at the edge of the known world, lost and afraid. All along, I had told myself that I did not have a choice, that I had been the one to put myself into bondage and I had to accept this fate. Somehow I had also convinced myself that my redemption could only come from some force outside of me -- that if I were useful to others, they would save me. What a terrible thing to believe. I had to stop playing a part in my own misery. I had to save my own life.

-- Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad." --- first sentence in the novel "Scaramouche" by Rafael Sabatini.

Friendship has splendors that love knows not. It grows stronger when crossed, whereas obstacles kill love. Friendship resists time, which wearies and severs couples. It has has heights unknown to love.

--Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter

“In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people's home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!”

"If you're looking for sympathy, you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary."
-David Sedaris

"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is just putting its shoes on."
-Mark Twain

The world ain't ready for true black genius. In every nigger is a cup of African blood from kings and queens of divine nature, mathematicians, craftsmen, men and women of the land. I have known some sisters and brothers would scare Einstein back into East European caves with the magnificence of their minds. We are a people with a practical nature and great vision. We have built nations, discovered treasures for everyday use. Our people are a great race of people, and though the Europeans raped and plundered, we have kept inner riches. You got a cup of African blood and that mean something, means you got a responsibility to be proud of it and use your talents or suffer self-destruction.

--Shay Youngblood, Black Girl in Paris

"... let us not be blind to our differences -- but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal. "
--- President John F. Kennedy, Commencement Address at American University, Washington DC (June 10th, 1963)

“We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float.” 

__Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things

"The starved eye devours the seascape for the morsel
Of a sail."

___Derek Walcott, The Castaway