Ntozake Shange
I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager... and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that.Collection: Anger
Art gives us the opportunity to have clarity as well as hope that we might be able to survive a situation, or hope that we can find a way out of it without too much more injury to ourselves.Collection: Hope
When I die, I will not be guilty of having left a generation of girls behind thinking that anyone can tend to their emotional health other than themselves.Collection: Health
I write for young girls of color, for girls who don't even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive. I can only change how they live, not how they think.Collection: Change
Sisterhood is important because we are all we have to stand on. We have to stand near and by each other, pray for one another, and share the joys and the difficulties that women face in the world today. If we don't talk about it among ourselves, then we are made silent by the patriarchy, and that serves us no purpose.Collection: Women
Spell-check ruins my work. It fixes all my slang and dialect into standard English. So I'm caught in a tangle of technology that feels very foreign to me.Collection: Technology
I think art is a healing force, and if we give in to the joy that can be found in art, then we are able to sustain ourselves in spite of ourselves.
White people use their literature to maintain culture. That's why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.
I'm a firm believer that language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives and other people's lives.
Multiculturalism is a white people joke.
Multiculturalism isn't about culture, it's about power.
If anything is life-changing, being the descendant of a slave is.
I remember that my mother used to take me to see ballets, especially if there were black people in them.
I was chastised for writing several obituaries for Malcolm X, exploring different aspects of his writing. One teacher in particular told me, didn't I think I was beating a dead horse? and dismissively threw my paper on my desk.
Before I went to college, I went to the S.N.C.C. office three times a week to offer my services and catch up on my 'Liberator' magazine. The other two days, I went to the Lycee Francais to keep my French crisp. I felt comfortable in the diversity of my worlds.
I was constantly being sought after for money. And the vitriol that came my way from many who felt threatened by controversial aspects of 'for colored girls' was often frightening.
My characters don't talk necessarily in a normal American way of talking. They talk a little different.
I've still got my characters in my head, and I can still hear them. When I go to the grocery store, I hear them.
I never intended to go to Broadway. I was very happy being in an Off Broadway theater and having an Off Broadway life. What it did to me is try to fit a round peg - that's me - into a whole bunch of square buildings. I just didn't fit.
It still amazes and fascinates me that women of color have kept my work alive for these many generations.
There was quite a ruckus about the seven ladies in their simple colored dresses. I was truly dumbfounded that I was, right then and there, deemed the biggest threat to black men since cotton pickin', and not all women were in my corner, either.
My family moved around a lot, so I don't have any friends that I had all my life, but I did have annual trips back to Queens.
I hadn't published a book of poetry in over a decade because I've been very ill. As I got better and started to write, I said, 'Wow, even as an old woman, I could have a selected book of poems.'
There was nothing to aspire to, no one to honor. Sojourner Truth wasn't a big enough role model for me. I couldn't go around abolishing slavery.
I had - there were three strokes, and I lost my ability to read and write and speak, and it really put me by the wayside for a number of years.
Luckily, my father and my mother liked us to talk, so they encouraged us to talk, so that the girls in my house, they're all very powerful speakers and powerful agents of their own will, as is my brother.
Creation is everything you do. Make something.Collection: Creativity
I write for young girls of color, for girls who don’t even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive. I can only change how they live, not how they think.Collection: Girl
i found god in myself and i loved her i loved her fiercelyCollection: Love
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.Collection: Inspiring
I am gonna write poems til i die and when i have gotten outta this body i am gonna hang round in the wind and knock over everybody who got their feet on the ground.Collection: Writing
Where there is a woman there is magic.Collection: Women
When I die, I will no be guilty of having left a generation of girls behind thinking that anyone can tend to their emotional health other than themselves.Collection: Girl
my spirit is too ancient to understand the separation of soul & genderCollection: Soul
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.Collection: Girl
I'm committed to the idea that one of the few things human beings have to offer is the richness of unconscious and conscious emotional responses to being alive. ... The kind of esteem that's given to brightness/smartness obliterates average people or slow learners from participating fully in human life, particularly technical and intellectual life. But you cannot exclude any human being from emotional participation.Collection: Emotional
Right now being born a girl is to be born threatened.Collection: Girl
our dreams draw blood from old sores.Collection: Dream
Being alive and being a woman is all I got, but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't conquered yet.Collection: Women
Our society allows people to be absolutely neurotic and totally out of touch with their feelings and everyone else's feelings, and yet be very respectable.Collection: People
The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.Collection: Pain
in our ordinaryness we are most bizarre.Collection: Bizarre
I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager. . .and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that. . .Collection: Teenager
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.Collection: Sympathy
And this is for Colored girls who have considered suicide, but are moving to the ends of their own rainbows.Collection: Girl
I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.Collection: Wall
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-upCollection: Sweet
nice is such a rip-off.Collection: Nice
Novels allow me to create a whole world.Collection: World