Marita Golden Quotes & Sayings

I am a stranger to half measures. — Marita Golden

It was important, I know, for my father as a product of his times not to be vulnerable, so he chose, and I can't say that I blame him, to live his life rather than create it. — Marita Golden

I quickly learned that motherhood was a high wire act sometimes performed without a net. — Marita Golden

The symbiotic relationship between reading and writing is a cornerstone of our individual intellectual journey and our educational system. We write as an act of self-expression. We read because language renders unto us the vitality of real and imagined experience. — Marita Golden

We knew no one man had killed the prophet. Rather, the combined weight of racism and an absence of moral courage had crushed him. A constitution ignored, laws denied, these were the weapons. America pulled the trigger. — Marita Golden

Racism is a virus. And since nobody's really looking too hard for a cure it reproduces itself over and over again. — Marita Golden

To my father, who told me the stories that matter. To my mother, who taught me to remember them. — Marita Golden

Imagination bound us stronger than love. Within its limitless borders we launched ships and love affairs, discovered lost worlds, made buildings and babies, found husbands, wrote letters and Broadway plays. We made ourselves up everyday. — Marita Golden

Surviving and believing in tomorrow is just a habit I can't break. — Marita Golden

Ironically, white America will catapult books about race to the top of the best-seller list, even as racism remains a national open wound. Obsession ain't solution, however, because reading even at its most intense and verisimilitudinous is vicarious, and once you close the book you're off the hook. — Marita Golden

We black women must forgive black men for not protecting us against slavery, racism, white men, our confusion, their doubts. And black men must forgive black women for our own sometimes dubious choices, divided loyalties, and lack of belief in their possibilities. Only when our sons and our daughters know that forgiveness is real, existent, and that those who love them practice it, can they form bonds as men and women that really can save and change our community. — Marita Golden

My mother used to do all the things that were important to her after midnight ... Sometimes I'd sneak downstairs and see her knitting, or reading, or writing letters. I'd think of her as a thief, stealing the tail end of the day, the hours nobody else wanted or used. — Marita Golden

Novelists have to love humanity to write anything worthwhile. Poets have to love themselves. — Marita Golden

My life is too important to share with someone who can't understand it. — Marita Golden

I am a stranger to half measures. With life I am on the attack, restlessly ferreting out each pleasure, foraging for answers, wringing from it even the pain. I ransack life, hunt it down. I am the hungry peasants storming the palace gates. I will have my share. No matter how it tastes. — Marita Golden

Love is going to replace life and from then on it's all smooth sailing. Love will replace life. — Marita Golden