[quotes] The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century - Grace Lee Boggs 2011

 

"Above all, Americans have learned that the tremendous changes we now need and yearn for in our daily lives and in the direction of our country cannot come from those in power or from putting pressure on those in power. We ourselves have to foreshadow or prefigure them from the ground."

"With the end of empire, we are coming to an end of the epoch of rights. We have entered the epoch of responsibilities, which requires new, more socially-minded human beings and new, more participatory and place-based concepts of citizenship and democracy."

"... self-transformation and structural transformation must go hand in hand."

"In words that will resonate throughout this book, we must define revolution both by the humanity-stretching ends to be achieved and the beloved community-building means by which to achieve those ends."

"At a time when jobs and whole industries are collapsing, growing your own food seems reasonable."

"As Grace argues, Bush represents the end of an era - one dating back to the advent of capitalism and taking off with the rise of industrial society."

"... the change needed to overcome our mounting crises must be of revolutionary scale."

"These perilous times call for us to be both imaginative and generative. Time is precious. History awaits our response."

"Perhaps eighty million people have been killed in wars during my lifetime."

"At this point in the continuing evolution of our country and of the human race, we urgently need to stop thinking of ourselves as victims and to recognize that we must each become a part of the solution because we are each a part of the problem."

"Each of us needs to stop being a passive observer of the suffering that we know is going on in the world and start identifying with the sufferers."

"The will of too many Americans has been to pursue private happiness and take as little responsibility as possible for governing our country."

"Einstein asserted that the solution of world peace could arise only from inside the hearts of humankind. That is why 'imagination is more important than knowledge.'"

"He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

"Freedom now included the responsibility for making choices."

"The social activists among us struggle to create actions that go beyond protest and negativity and build community because community is the most important thing that has been destroyed by the dominant culture."

"That is why linking Love and Revolution is an idea whose time has come."

"We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other."

"Now, in the light of our historical experiences and thanks especially to the indigenous cultures that the Zapatistas have revealed to us, we are beginning to understand that the world is always being made and never finished; that activism can be the journey rather than the arrival; that struggle doesn't always have to be confrontational but can take the form of reaching out to find common ground with the many 'others' in our society who are also seeking ways out from alienation, isolation, privatization, and dehumanization by corporate globalization."

"Because of these unseen connections, there is potential value in working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness."

"Real poverty is the belief that the purpose of life is acquiring wealth and owning things. Real wealth is not the possession of property but the recognition that our deepest need, as human beings, is to keep developing our natural and acquired powers and to relate to other human beings."

"These two notions - that reality is constantly changing and that you must constantly be aware of the new and more challenging contradictions that drive change - lie at the core of dialectical thinking."

"The next American Revolution, at this stage in our history, is not principally about jobs or health insurance or making it possible for more people to realize the American Dream of upward mobility. It is about acknowledging that we Americans have enjoyed middle-class comforts at the expense of other peoples all over the world."

"We are the ones who must begin to live more simply so that others can simply live."

"Instead of pursuing economic productivity, we need to expand our uniquely human powers, especially our capacity for Love."

"Most people think of Love only in terms of affection, between lovers (eros) or friends (philia). However, King's experiences as a black man in racist America had taught him that love of power goes hand in hand with dominating and destroying community. So he developed a concept of Love (he called it 'Agape'), which is based on the willingness to go to any lengths to restore or create community."

"Gerald was unique in that his dreams were not only in his heart and head but also in his hands."

"Teach people what will truly help them, he said, not to become servants and bureaucrats for the Empire but to aid them in all the little things of village life. Education, he said, should be of the Heart, the Hand, and the Head."

"Healing our society will require the patient work not primarily of politicians but of artists, ministers, gardeners, workers, families, women, and communities. It will require new forms of governance, work, and education that are much more participatory and democratic than those collapsing all around us."

[quotes] The Color Purple - Alice Walker 1982

 

"I know this to be true, and yet it remains difficult to imagine."

"It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how come I know trees fear man."

"She look like she ain't long for this world but dressed well for the next."

"First time somebody made something and name it after me."

"And we kneeled down right on deck and gave thanks to God for letting us see the land for which our mothers and fathers cried - and lived and died - to see again."

"We know a roofleaf is not Jesus Christ, but in its own humble way, is it not God?"

"Oh, Celie, unbelief is a terrible thing. And so is the hurt we cause others unknowingly."

"Only the sky above us do we hold in common. I look at it often as if, somehow, reflected from its immensities, I will one day find myself gazing into your eyes."

"There is so much we don't understand. And so much unhappiness comes because of that."

"Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful, and lowdown."

"But if God love me, Celie, I don't have to do all that. Unless I want to. There's a lot of other things I can do that I speck God likes."

"Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not to find God."

"God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it."

"God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found it."

"My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all."

"You saying God vain? I ast. Naw, she say. Not vain, just waiting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it... People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back."

"Try to think like you got some sense. Why any woman give a shit what people think is a mystery to me."

"Shug look at me and us giggle. Then us laugh sure nuff. Then Squeak start to laugh. Then Sofia. All us laugh and laugh."

"I curse you, I say. What that mean? he say. I say, Until you do right by me, everything you touch will crumble... Until you do right by me, I say, everything you even dream about will fail. I give it to him straight, just like it come to me. And it seem to come to me from the trees."

"I'm pore, I'm black, I may be ugly and can't cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I'm here."

"I smoke when I want to talk to God. I smoke when I want to make love. Lately I feel like me and God make love just fine anyhow. Whether I smoke reefer or not."

"Our days are fuller than ever, our sojourn in England already a dream. But all things look brighter because I have a loving soul to share them with."

"I don't say nothing. I pray to die, just so I don't never have to speak."

"Celie, I say, happiness was just a trick in your case. Just cause you never had any before Shug, you thought it was time to have some, and that it was gon last. Even thought you had the trees with you. The whole earth. The stars. But look at you. When Shug left, happiness desert."

"But now Shug's six months is come and gone and she ain't come back. And I try to teach my heart not to want nothing it can't have."

"Yeah son, I tell him. THey had a lot of love to give. But I needed love plus understanding. They run a little short of that."

"Sometimes I feel mad at her. Feel like I could scratch her hair right off her head. But then I think, Shug got a right to live too. She got a right to look over the world in whatever company she choose. Just cause I love her don't take away none of her rights."

"Who am I to tell her who to love? My job just to love her good and true myself."

"And I thank God he let me gain understanding enough to know love can't be halted just cause some peoples moan and groan. It don't surprise me you love Shug Avery, he say. I Have love Shug Avery all my life."

"Hard not to love Shug, I say. She know how to love somebody back."

"I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love."

"If she come, I be happy. If she don't, I be content. And then I figure this the lesson I was suppose to learn."

"But I don't think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt."

[quotes] In Search of Our Mother's Gardens - Alice Walker 1983

 

"The absence of models, in literature as in life, to say nothing of painting, is an occupational hazard for the artist, simply because models in art, in behavior, in growth of spirit and intellect - even if rejected - enrich and enlarge one's view of existence."

"Therefore, to write the books one wants to read is both to point the direction of vision and, at the same time, to follow it."

"I had that wonderful feeling writers get sometimes, not very often, of being with a great many people, ancient spirits, all very happy to see me consulting and acknowledging them, and eager to let me know, through the joy of their presence, indeed, I am not alone."

"It is, in the end, the saving of lives that we writers are about. Whether we are 'minority' writers or 'majority'. It is simply in our power to do this... We care because we know this: the life we save is our own."

"What the black Southern writer inherits as a natural right is a sense of community. Something simple but surprisingly hard, 'especially these days, to come by'."

"Actually I suppose I am left with a project that will be a private one whose success will be largely immeasurable, but since I don't believe success must be measurable I don't mind at all."

"But please remember, especially in these times of groupthink and the right-on chorus, that no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended."

"I understand that each woman is capable of truly bringing another into the world. This we must all do for each other."

"But my mother has already opened the gate. To her, life has no fences, except, perhaps, religious ones, and these we have decided not to discuss."

"The fact that in Mississippi no one even remembers where Richard Wright lived, while Faulkner's house is maintained by a black caretaker is painful, but not unbearable. What comes close to being unbearable is that I know how damaging to my own psyche such injustice is. In an unjust society the soul of the sensitive person is in danger of deformity from just such weights as this. For a long time I will feel Faulkner's house, O'Connor's house, crushing me. To fight back will require a certain amount of energy, energy better used doing something else."

"Without money of one's own in a capitalist society, there is no such thing as independence."

"We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, and, if necessary, bone by bone."

"For such a woman the Civil Rights Movement will never be over as long as her skin is black."

"As long as one black American survives, the struggle for equality with other Americans must also survive."

"If knowledge of my condition is all the freedom I get from a 'freedom movement,' it is better than unawareness, forgottenness, and hopelessness, the existence that is like the existence of a beast."

"Part of what existence means to me is knowing the difference between what I am now and what I was then."

"The truest and most enduring impulse I have is simply to write."

"The real revolution is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff. With raising a reading level from second grade to third. With simplifying history and writing it down (or reciting it) for the old folks."

"And when I write about the people there, in the strangest way it is as if I am not writing them at all, but about myself. The artist then is the voice of the people, but she is also The People."

"We always agreed that when both of us were under a lot of pressure to be away from home I would be the one to curtail my activities. I wasn't too unhappy about this. It was really a question of knowing what our priorities were. And since my top priority has always been my family there was never any conflict."

"It was Martin, more than anyone, who exposed the hidden beauty of black people in the South, and caused us to look again at the land our fathers and mothers knew."

"And if I leave Mississippi - as I will one of these days - it will not be for the reasons of the other sons and daughters of my parents. Fear will have no part in my decision, nor will lack of freedom to express my womanly thoughts. It will be because the pervasive football culture bores me, and the proliferating Kentucky Fried Chicken stands appall me, and neon lights have begun to replace the trees. It will be because the sea is too far away and there is not a single mountain here. But most of all, it will be because I have freed myself to go; and it will be My Choice."

"'I want peace,' he says. 'Cleanliness and space around me. And just some time to be myself, before I die.'"

"What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great-grandmothers' day? It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood."

"The agony of the lives of women who might have been Poets, Novelists, Essayists, and Short-Story Writers (over a period of centuries), who died with their real gifts stifled within them."

"Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength - in search of my mother's garden, I found my own."

"that is, the book itself did not seem to me important; only the writing of the poems, which clarified for me how very much I loved being alive."

"Since that time, it seems to me that all of my poems - and I write groups of poems rather than singles - are written when I have successfully pulled myself out of a completely numbing despair, and stand again in the sunlight. Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before."

"Women who wanted their rights did not frighten him, politically or socially, because he knew his own rights were not diminished by theirs."

"And the giggles and the tears and the holding and the sanctioning of responsibility to those we love and those who have loved us is what I know will see us through."

"She fell for the first man who loved her enough to beat her for looking at someone else, and when I was still in high school, she married him."

"Fatally irradiating ourselves may in fact be the only way to save others from what Earth has already become. And this is a consideration that I believe requires serious thought from every one of us."

"Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it."

"So let me tell you: I intend to protect my home. Praying - not a curse - only the hope that my courage will not fail my love. But if by some miracle, and all our struggle, the Earth is spared, only justice to every living thing (and everything is alive) will save humankind. And we are not saved yet. Only justice can stop a curse."

"I am in the desert for the first time. I fall totally in love with it. I am so overwhelmed by its beauty, I confront for the first time, consciously, the meaning of the doctor's words years ago: 'Eyes are sympathetic. If one is blind, the other will likely become blind too.' I realize I have dashed about the world madly, looking at this, looking at that, storing up images against the fading of the light. But I might have missed seeing the desert! The shock of that possibility - and gratitude for over twenty-five years of sight - sends me literally to my knees. Poem after poem comes - which is perhaps how poets pray."