Gloria Naylor Quotes & Sayings

Once I unlocked the mystery of the alphabet that led to words, a multitude of words connecting me to the world, there was no stopping me. — Gloria Naylor

There is a problem in America. An Irish or Polish American can write a story and it's an American story. When a Black American writes a story, it's called a Black story. I take exception to that. Every artist has articulated to his own experience. The problem is that some people do not see Blacks as Americans. — Gloria Naylor

Just like that chicken coop, everything got four sides: his side, her side, an outside, and an inside. All of it is the truth. — Gloria Naylor

The beginnings are gone, Laurel. But we can start with today and what you got around you. — Gloria Naylor

There are no absolute truths, and the best historians know that. You strive to capture a moment of time, and if your work is done properly, history becomes a written photograph. — Gloria Naylor

There's something hypocritical about a city that keeps half of its population underground half of the time; you can start believing that there's much more space than there really is
to live, to work. — Gloria Naylor

1) "school isn't where the real learning happens." (3). — Gloria Naylor

That's one of the privileges of old age - you can give plenty of advice 'cause most folks think that's all you got left anyway. — Gloria Naylor

The last time you're doing something - knowing you're doing it for the last - makes it even more alive than the first. — Gloria Naylor

Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song. — Gloria Naylor

Lord keep her safe since you can't keep her sane. — Gloria Naylor

I don't want to write without a sense of drama, without passion, or without both eyes open to the world around me. — Gloria Naylor

Words themselves are innocuous; it is the consensus that gives them true power. — Gloria Naylor

The high stone fireplace, the heavy walnut tables, the fringed Oriental rug, the leather furniture. The air definitely came alive, but Willie felt out of place. Not because of any excessive luxury-the furnishings, while meticulously preserved, were still scarred and worn, but they seemed to suspend him in another time. Why, it was like walking into a movie set for Wuthering Heights. — Gloria Naylor

A myth is more powerful - and more lasting - than reality. — Gloria Naylor

Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystalize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days. It is silent and elusive, refusing to be damned and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the conciousness at ragged, unexpected intervals. — Gloria Naylor

2)"Even though this planet is round, there are just too many spots where you can find yourself hanging on to the edge just like I was; and unless there's some space, some place, to take a breather for awhile, the edge of the world- frightening as it is- could be the end of the world, which would be quite a pity." (28). — Gloria Naylor

You can lose a lot when you travel too much. — Gloria Naylor

Home. It's being new and old all rolled into one. Measuring your new against old friends, old ways, old places, Knowing that as long as the old survives, you can keep changing as much as you want without the nightmare of waking up to a total stranger. — Gloria Naylor

Spoiled. That's all it's about - can't live without this, can't live without that. You can live without anything you weren't born with, and you can make it through on even half of that. — Gloria Naylor

I wrote what I felt I had to write, and I'm willing to put my own sanity and my reputation behind it. — Gloria Naylor

She breathed deeply of the freedom she found in Mattie's presence. Here she had no choice but to be herself. The carefully erected decoys she was constantly shuffling and changing to fit the situation were of no use here. Etta and Mattie went way back, a singular term that claimed co-knowledge of all the important events in their lives and almost all of the unimportant ones. And by rights of this possession, it tolerated no secrets. — Gloria Naylor

Power knows power. — Gloria Naylor

They all trying to say something with music that you can't say with plain talk. There ain't really no words for love or pain. And the way I see it, only fools go around trying to talk their love or talk their pain. So the smart people make music and you can kinda hear about it without them saying anything. — Gloria Naylor

Now that she had actually seen and accepted reality, and reality brought such a healing calm. — Gloria Naylor

A loud voice is not always angry; a soft voice not always to be dismissed; and a well-placed silence can be the indisputable last word. — Gloria Naylor

True insanity, as frightening as it might be, gives a sort of obliviousness to the chaos in a life. People who commit suicide are struggling to order their existence, and when they see it's a losing battle, they will finalize it rather than have it wrenched from them. Insanity wouldn't permit that type of clarity. — Gloria Naylor

There is nothing in back of this cafe. Since the place sits right on the margin between the edge of the world and infinite possibility, he back door opens out to a void. It takes courage to turn the knob and heart to leave the steps. — Gloria Naylor

You can't teach talent. You can't put in what God left out - but you can teach confidence. — Gloria Naylor

Self-consciousness is really a form of egotism. — Gloria Naylor

Old as he was, he still missed his daddy sometimes. — Gloria Naylor

Like they say, it takes all types to make the world. But sometimes you wish it didn't. — Gloria Naylor

Ut it's one of the reflections of our times. Young minds today are dulled by television and other visual sensations. When reading was one of the few pleasures available, we could recite whole passages to eachother. — Gloria Naylor

The music in his laughter had a way of rounding off the missing notes in her soul. — Gloria Naylor

Six months of looking for a job had made me an expert at picking out the people who, like me, were hurrying up to wait - in somebody's outer anything for a chance to make it through their inner doors to prove that you could type two words a minute, or not drool on your blouse while answering difficult questions about your middle initial and date of birth. — Gloria Naylor

Why do I write? The truth, the unvarnished truth, is that I haven't a clue. — Gloria Naylor

The right woman is the one you can live with, not the one in your head. — Gloria Naylor

Ain't nothing to be shamed of. Having a baby is the most natural thing there is. The Good Book call children a gift from the Lord. And there ain't no place in that Bible of His that say babies is sinful. The sin is the fornicatin', and that's over and done with. God done forgave you of that a long time ago, and what's going on in your belly now ain't nothin' to hang your head about
you remember that. — Gloria Naylor

The unpainted walls of the long rectangular room were soaked with the smell of greasy chicken and warm, headless beer. The brown and pink faces floated above the trails of used cigarette smoke like bodiless carnival balloons. — Gloria Naylor

Time is a funny thing. I was always puzzled with the way a single day could stretch itself out to the point of eternity in your mind, all while years melted down into the fraction of a second. — Gloria Naylor

When you raise a god instead of a child, you're bound to be serving him for the rest of your days. Same thing holds when you marry a god. — Gloria Naylor

I realize at one point, that I was being followed, and then I began to see the surveillance that was going past the road on my house. And so, these cars began to surveil me. People began to follow me around, and it did, it was very disrupting to think that your privacy was being violated, and for no reason that I could come up with. — Gloria Naylor

But I don't believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or to make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel. — Gloria Naylor

She had stepped into the thin strip of earth that they claimed as their own. Bound by the last building on Brewster and a brick wall, they reigned in that unlit alley like dwarfed warrior kings. Born with the appendages of power, circumcised by the guillotine, and baptized with the steam from a million non reflective mirrors, these young men wouldn't be called upon to thrust a bayonet into an Asian farmer, target a torpedo, scatter their iron seed from a B-52 into the wound of the earth, point a finger to move a nation, or stick a pole into the moon
and they knew it. They only had that three-hundred-foot alley to serve them as stateroom, armored tank, and executioner's chamber. — Gloria Naylor

She done mellowed plenty since this marriage. Soft around the edges without getting too soft at the center. You fear that sometimes for women, that they would just fold up and melt away. She'd seen it happen so much in her time, too much for her to head on into it without thinking. Yes, that one time when she was way, way young. But after that, looking at all the beating, the badgering, the shriveling away from a lack of true touching was enough to give her pause. Not that she mighta hooked up with one of those. And not that any man - even if he tried - coulda ever soaked up the best in her. But who needed to wake up each morning cussing the day just to be sure you still had your voice? A woman shouldn't have to fight her man to be what she was; he should be fighting that battle for her. — Gloria Naylor

She could walk through a lightning storm without being touched; grab a bolt of lightning in the palm of her hand; use the heat of lightning to start the kindling going under her medicine pot. She turned the moon into salve, the stars into swaddling cloth, and healed the wounds of every creature walking up on two or down on four. — Gloria Naylor

We get so caught up in what a man isn't. It's what he is that counts. — Gloria Naylor

3)"One man's weed is another man's flower." (115). — Gloria Naylor

One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work. — Gloria Naylor

Life is accepting what is and working from that. — Gloria Naylor

I was so busy enjoying the change in you, I didn't notice it in myself. — Gloria Naylor

In a contest between new technology and old ways of life, it is the traditional rhythms that will hold. Traditional societies make up more than two-thirds of the world, the two-thirds that will not be going online to "save" time but will remain wedded to the knowledge that if the bus doesn't come that day, it will come someday. After all, there is nothing but time. — Gloria Naylor

Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over. — Gloria Naylor

Contempt mates well with pity. — Gloria Naylor

Old as she was, she still missed her daddy sometimes. — Gloria Naylor

Bloody noses had made them friends, but giving sound to the bruised places in their hearts made them brothers. — Gloria Naylor

A star dies in heaven every time you snatch away someone's dream. — Gloria Naylor

You don't repay kindness with needless cruelty. — Gloria Naylor

The intelligence community, for the most part, has no accountability at all; to the Congress, to us the American people, and so they feel that they above the law. — Gloria Naylor

He holds his glass up and turns to me as a single flake catches on the rim before melting down the one side into an amber world where bubbles burst and are born, burst and are born. — Gloria Naylor

It's as if I've arrived in a place where it's all spirit and no body
an overwhelming sense of calm ... I actually began to feel blessed. — Gloria Naylor

We all don't have to see eye to eye in order to see our way to the Kingdom. It's the heart condition of each man that the Lord will judge. — Gloria Naylor

Life's too short to spend time trying to explain the obvious to an idiot. — Gloria Naylor

There are many subtle ways with which you can make one strong point. — Gloria Naylor

Black isn't beautiful and it isn't ugly - black is! It's not kinky hair and it's not straight hair - it just is. — Gloria Naylor