Jessie Redmon Fauset Quotes & Sayings

We've all of us got to make up our minds to the sacrifice of some thing. I mean something more than just the ordinary sacrifices in life, not so much for the sake of the next generation as for the sake of some principle, for the sake of some immaterial quality like pride or intense self-respect or even a saving complacency; a spiritual tonic which the race needs perhaps just as much as the body might need iron or whatever it does need to give the proper kind of resistance. There are some things which an individual might want, but which he'd just have to give up forever for the sake of the more important whole. — Jessie Redmon Fauset

Sometimes I think no matter how one is born, no matter how one acts, there is something out of gear with one somewhere, and that must be changed. Life at its best is a grand corrective. — Jessie Redmon Fauset

To be a colored man in America ... and enjoy it, you must be greatly daring, greatly stolid, greatly humorous and greatly sensitive. And at all times a philosopher ... — Jessie Redmon Fauset

I like Paris because I find something here, something of integrity, which I seem to have strangely lost in my own country. It is simplest of all to say that I like to live among people and surroundings where I am not always conscious of 'thou shall not.' I am colored and wish to be known as colored, but sometimes I have felt that my growth as a writer has been hampered in my own country. And so - but only temporarily - I have fled from it. — Jessie Redmon Fauset

The Complex of color ... every colored man feels it sooner or later. It gets in the way of his dreams, of his education, of his marriage, of the rearing of his children. — Jessie Redmon Fauset

Aviation is poetry ... It's the finest kind of moving around, you know, just as poetry is the finest way of using words. — Jessie Redmon Fauset

The old aphorisms are basically sound. First impressions are lasting. — Jessie Redmon Fauset