Toni Cade Bambara Quotes
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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.
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And what is religion, you might ask. It's a technology of living.
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Medication without explanation is obscene.
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All writers, musicians, artists, choreographers/dancers, etc., work with the stuff of their experiences. It's the translation of it, the conversion of it, the shaping of it that makes for the drama.
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The only proper mask to wear in life is your own damn face.
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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.
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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.
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My responsibility to myself, my neighbors, my family and the human family is to try to tell the truth.
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The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible
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Reappraise the past, re-evaluate where we've been, clarify where we are, and predict or anticipate where we are headed. . . .
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The story is a piece of work. The novel is a way of life.
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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?
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An artist represents an oppressed people and makes revolution irresistible.
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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.
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Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.
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One monkey don't stop no show. Not one, not six. The struggle continues.
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Not all speed is movement.
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Take away the miseries and you take away some folks' reason for living.
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TAKE HEART TO FLAT OUT DECIDE TO BE WELL AND STRIDE INTO THE FUTURE, SANE AND WHOLE
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Old folks are the nation.
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Writing is a legitimate way, an important way, to participate in the empowerment of the community that names me.
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We have not been scuffling in this waste - howling wilderness for the right to be stupid. All this waste.
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She [my mother] gave me permission to wonder, to dawdle, to daydream.
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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.
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What can defeat greed, technological superiority, and legal lawlessness ... is discipline, consciousness, and unity.
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(M)aybe we too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect . . . you know . . . like being people.
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Revolution begins with the self, in the self.
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For people sometimes believed that it was safer to live with complaints, was necessary to cooperate with grief, was all right to become an accomplice in self-ambush... Take heart to flat out decide to be well and stride into the future sane and whole.
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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.
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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.
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