"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."
No comments:
Post a Comment