Toni Cade Bambara
The dream is real, my friends. The failure to realize it is the only unreality.Collection: Failure
Revolution begins with the self, in the self.
The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.
I've never been convinced that experience is linear, circular, or even random. It just is. I try to put it in some kind of order to extract meaning from it, to bring meaning to it.
And what is religion, you might ask. It's a technology of living.
When you dream, you dialogue with aspects of yourself that normally are not with you in the daytime and you discover that you know a great deal more than you thought you did.
I'll be damned if I want most folks out there to do unto me what they do unto themselves.
It's a dismally lonely business, writing.
The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistibleCollection: Art
Revolution begins with the self, in the self.... We'd better take the time to fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, revolutionary relationships. Mouth don't win the war.Collection: Fashion
Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion. I've seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges.Collection: Taken
The only proper mask to wear in life is your own damn face.Collection: Self
Writing is a legitimate way, an important way, to participate in the empowerment of the community that names me.Collection: Writing
My responsibility to myself, my neighbors, my family and the human family is to try to tell the truth.Collection: Responsibility
The dream is real, my friends. The failure to make it work is the unreality.Collection: Dream
Not all speed is movement.Collection: Movement
Reappraise the past, re-evaluate where we've been, clarify where we are, and predict or anticipate where we are headed. . . .Collection: Past
Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.Collection: Writing
What can defeat greed, technological superiority, and legal lawlessness ... is discipline, consciousness, and unity.Collection: Discipline
She [my mother] gave me permission to wonder, to dawdle, to daydream.Collection: Mother
Write a lot and hit the streets. A writer who doesn't keep up with what's out there ain't gonna be out there.Collection: Writing
An artist represents an oppressed people and makes revolution irresistible.Collection: Art
People have to be given permission to write, and they have to be given space to breathe and stumble. They have to be given time to develop and to reveal what they can do.Collection: Writing
Take away the miseries and you take away some folks' reason for living.Collection: Life
Our lives preserved. How it was; and how it be. Passing it along in the relay. That is what I work to do: to produce stories that save our lives.Collection: Life
(M)aybe we too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect . . . you know . . . like being people.Collection: Flower
One monkey don't stop no show. Not one, not six. The struggle continues.Collection: Struggle
I try to live [the Golden Rule] and I certainly expect it of some particular others. But I'll be damned if I want most folk out there to do unto me what they do unto themselves.Collection: Trying
The story is a piece of work. The novel is a way of life.Collection: Stories
What is happening to the daughters of the yam? Seem like they just don't know how to draw up the powers from the deep like before. Not full sunned and sweet anymore.Collection: Daughter
... in a capitalist society a man is expected to be an aggressive, uncompromising, factual, lusty, intelligent provider of goods,and the woman, a retiring, gracious, emotional, intuitive, attractive consumer of goods.Collection: Intelligent
There are times ... when any visitor - in person, by phone, by mail - is an intruder, a burglar, a space hogger, an oxygen taker, a chaos maker, a conflict inducer, a mood chaser, and a total drag.Collection: Space
Old folks are the nation.Collection: Folks
When we ever invited the beast to dinner he didn't come in and swipe the napkins and start taking notes on the tablecloth 'bout how to take over the whole house?Collection: House
We have not been scuffling in this waste - howling wilderness for the right to be stupid. All this waste.Collection: Stupid
I tend to agree that celibacy for a time is worth considering, for sex is dirty if all it means is winning a man, conquering a woman, beating someone out of something, abusing each other's dignity in order to prove that I am a man, I am a woman.Collection: Sex
old folks is the nation.Collection: Age
Medication without explanation is obscene.Collection: Health