• "then he remembered his father and his mother, and all the arms stretched out to hold him back, to save him from this city where, they said, his soul would find perdition." - james baldwin, go tell it on the mountain
  • "a most striking metamorphosis into freedom" - james baldwin
  • "the soul within me cried that all the husk of indifference to sorrow was but the crust of ice with which winter disguises life: it will melt, and reality will burgeon forth like the crocuses in the glen." - alice moore dunbar-nelson
  • "hate may destroy me, but from my brown limbs will bloom the golden buds with which we once spelled love." - alice moore dunbar-nelson
  • "perhaps the world is darker and therefore more real than we have allowed ourselves to believe." - james baldwin
  • "in the fullness of their poetry" - gabriel garcia marquez
  • "Who has empowered you, you Tetzel, to peddle round your indulgences from divine ordinations? The hairs of our heads are numbered, and the days of our lives. In thunder as in sunshine, I stand at ease in the hands of my God. False negotiator, away!" - herman melville
  • "only the lord saw the midnight tears, only He was present when one of His children, moaning and wringing hands, paced up and down the room." - james baldwin
  • "i bore a hell within me, which nothing could extinguish." - mary shelley
  • "Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful." - mary shelley
  • "our people are too poor to be too selfish with their sun" - II Francina, Edward Brathwaite
  • "we're all consequences of something" - corregidora, gayl jones
  • "death inherits death" - from aurora leigh by elizabeth barrett browning
  • "You don't break a curse. You get out of its way." - Dean in the bug episode of supernatural
  • "Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it." - Audre Lorde
  • "You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it." —James Baldwin
  • "Writing is really a way of thinking—not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.” —Toni Morrison
  • "The purpose of any piece of writing is its existence before a reader’s eyes. A writer exists when she fills the blank page. A writer fulfills her task when she can be read by readers. The important thing is to write." —Nancy Morejón
  • "The ability to use language to effective ends, to have somebody read something and see it, or for somebody to paint an entire landscape of visual imagery with just sheets of words—that’s magical." — Yasiin Bey (Mos Def)
  • "By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication." —Ralph Ellison
  • "The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart." —Maya Angelou
  • " Of all the pitfalls in our paths and the tremendous delays and wanderings off the track I want to say that they are not what they seem to be. I want to say that all that seems like fantastic mistakes are not mistakes, all that seems like error is not error; and it all has to be done. That which seems like a false step is the next step." - Agnes Martin
  • "Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." - Terry Pratchett
  • "I am the shape you made me. Filth teaches filth." - Sophokles, from Elektra, An Oresteia: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos; Elektra by Sophokles; Orestes by Euripides (tr. Anne Carson)
  • " Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed." - Alice Walker
  • "What woman is so enamoured with her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman’s face?" - Audre Lorde
  • "No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep." - Zora Neale Hurston
  • There are ways of dying that don’t end in funerals. Types of death you can’t smell. - Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
  • What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? - Audre Lorde, from “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde
  • I do not want revenge, I do not want / expiation, / I only want to ask someone / how I was lost, / how I was lost - Margaret Atwood, Owl Song
  • You must remember this. It was all I had, all I’ve ever had, the only currency, the only proof I was alive. Memory. - Abraham Verghese
feb 1 2014 ∞
aug 22 2021 +