Quotes & Sayings About African American Literature

I wanted to hug them all. We belonged to each other somehow...But that sweet feeling hung on and I loved all of Harlem gently and didn't want to be Puerto Rican or anything else but my own rusty self. — Louise Meriwether

like many families, everyone wandered around like children in a funhouse - they could hardly see one another around the corners, and what they could see was completely distorted. — James Hannaham

I read mostly Irish, African, Japanese, South American, and African writers. You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style. — Chris Abani

Big Ma didn't need to say any more and she didn't. T.J. was far from her favorite person and it was quite obvious that Stacey and I owed our good fortune entirely to T.J.'s obnoxious personality. — Mildred D. Taylor

At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can't fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I'm reading, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I think I'm in literature,' but my life was never like that. — Soledad O'Brien

The trick set me up. It's that simple. — Shadez

You are both puppet and puppeteer of your world. — Matshona Dhliwayo

They do not like to hear such expressions as "Negro literature," "Negro poetry," "African art," or "thinking black"; and, roughly speaking, we must concede that such things do not exist. These things did not figure in the courses which they pursued in school, and why should they? "Aren't we all Americans? Then, whatever is American is as much the heritage of the Negro as of any other group in — Carter G. Woodson

So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day. — Zora Neale Hurston

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. — Zora Neale Hurston

You can handcuff my wrists, and Shackle my feet. You can bind me in chains, throw me in your deepest darkest dungeon...but you can't enslave my thinking...for it is free like the wind. — Jaye Swift

Literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it. — James Baldwin

He gave a talk in which he argued that the way they measured risk was completely idiotic. They measured risk by volatility: how much a stock or bond happened to have jumped around in the past few years. Real risk was not volatility; real risk was stupid investment decisions. — Michael Lewis

I'm not like he is, you know," he tells me, but that isn't the part that stirs my cold, dead heart. It's the words he follows it up with a second later, as though it barely takes him anything to let them out: "So if you want to run, run. I won't sit on the side-lines and wait for you to slip away, like you never existed." He pauses, thickly. Takes a second, in a way I can understand. "I'll fight for you, El. I'll always fight for you. — Charlotte Stein

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form. — Toni Morrison

Ambition is like love, impatient both of delays and rivals. — Gautama Buddha

Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger. — Michael N. Castle

May God sanctify every soul. — Lailah Gifty Akita

It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful. — Zora Neale Hurston

We had to throw rocks," she said miserably. "I told her to run, to go be free, that I didn't want her anymore. There were other wolves for her to play with, we heard them howling, and Jory said the woods were full of game, so she'd have deer to hunt. Only she kept following and finally we had to throw rocks. I hit her twice. She whined and looked at me and I felt so 'shamed, but it was right, wasn't it? The queen would have killed her."
"It was right," her father said. "And even the lie was ... not without honour. — George R R Martin

He was a glance from God. — Zora Neale Hurston

Black children need to see their lives reflected in the books they read. If they don't, they won't feel welcome in the world of literature. The lives of African-Americans are rich and diverse, and the books our children read should reflect that. — Valerie Wilson Wesley

He began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind.. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making. — Zora Neale Hurston

In the early 1970s in Atlanta, I attended what had formerly been an all-white school but had become a black school after integration and white flight. Perhaps because of this, the teachers created a curriculum that included a focus on African American literature and history year-round, not just in February. — Natasha Trethewey

Her teeth were like a soccer crowd, crammed in. — Markus Zusak

Stories are better than fiction, so let's hope for some real-life sequels. — Katherine Ramsland

You're an unpopular man. Memorable-but remarkably unpopular. You have no friends, for instance, in Brooklyn. Around Henry Street, say, where old women sit on the stoops in their aprons and men play dominoes on cardtables by the curb. — James Sallis

I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers. — Ralph Ellison

There is no achievement gap at birth. — Lisa Delpit

Everybody black knows how to react to a tragedy. Just bring out a wheelbarrow full of the Same Old Anger, dump it all over the Usual Frustration, and water it with Somebody Oughtas, all of which Bethella did. Then quietly set some globs of Genuine Awe in a circle around the mixture, but don't call too much attention to that. Mention the Holy Spirit whenever possible. — James Hannaham

Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it's some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don't know nothin' but what we see. — Zora Neale Hurston

Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream. — Jean Toomer

Realize this, though. Half my genes run through your body, and my selfish genome is heavily evolutionarily pre-programmed to look out for its copies. The other half is copied from the man I admire most in all the worlds and time, so my interest is doubly riveted. The artistic combination of the two, shall we say, arrests my attention. — Lois McMaster Bujold

They speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement ... — Isabel Wilkerson

Grief is not linear. It's not a slow progression forward toward healing, it's a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones. — Lisa Unger

So many times, I tried to imagine how he would look like and always ended up believing he is no more than a faceless monster. — Refaat Alareer

Being asked to play one of the butlers is like being picked to play for England. All you have to do is think of the great butlers from the past - Terry-Thomas in 'How To Murder Your Wife,' John Gielgud in 'Arthur' and Denholm Elliott in 'Trading Places.' — Mark Williams

He Said...

Your garden at dusk
Is the soul of love
Blurred in its beauty
And softly caressing;
I, gently daring
This sweetest confessing,
Say your garden at dusk
Is your soul, My Love. — Anne Spencer

This book is dedicated to every woman who has ever felt self-conscious about her size. Outer beauty comes in all sizes, shapes, heights, ages, and colors. And inner beauty will always shine through, no matter what the packaging. — Raynetta Manees

And that's the beginning of the primary conversation in African American literature, right there: the African descendant explaining to the European descendant about how white people's actions are affecting the lives of black people.* In — Mat Johnson

Simple people have much to offer. We, too, in return, must give to them to the best of our abilities. We must, with all our heart, try to help them acquire what they truly deserve. — Simin Daneshvar