Quote collection
416 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Odinary people don't have a feeling of being loved by the people who manage to get into positions of leadership. They get in there, they make a lot of money, and then they play games with us."
"Listen, God love everything you love - and a mess of stuff you don't. But more than anything else, God love admiration. You saying God vain? I ast. Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. What it do when it pissed off? I ast. Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back."
"No song or poem will bear my mother's name. Yet so many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother's stories."
"Helped are those too busy living to respond when they are wrongfully attacked: on their walks they shall find mysteries so intriguing as to distract them from every blow."
"I'm the kind of woman that likes to enjoy herselves in peace."
"Like I said...fine with me."
"People tend to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but actually only some people progress. The rest of the people don't."
"How anyone cannot see that Nature is God is amazing to me: that they'd rather worship something that can only exist, really, in their own minds."
"Well, sometime Mr —— git on me pretty hard. I have to talk to Old Maker. But he my husband. I shrug my shoulders. This life soon be over, I say. Heaven last all ways. You ought to bash Mr —— head open, she say. Think bout heaven later."
"Honestly, that is the most important thing to me: Can I continue to live up to my own expectations of myself - and not fall back into slacking?"
"It's better to have your blackness taken away than to stand and lie about who you actually are."
"The forest is the first cathedral. I felt that from the time I was a child. I credit my mother with that. I used to think it came from her Native-American side. Whichever it was, she instinctively connected with nature, and taught me that."
"I grew up in the South [USA states] under segregation. I know what terrorism feels like - when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn't look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. That's terrorism, too."
"Love likes to extend itself. If you receive it in a book - or however you get it - then your duty is to extend it beyond."
"My big complaint with myself is that I get tired. But, I forgive myself because it's human to get tired. But, I didn't always feel like I could forgive myself. There's a certain [drive], I think. But, now I feel like, "OK, you can be tired. People should let you be tired. Then you should go and take a nap, and you should sleep." That's about it."
"It's an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important... and to feel that you're being published by people who really don't get it and/or don't really care."
"You don't need organized religion to connect with the universe. Often a church is the only place you can go to find peace and quiet... But it shouldn't be confused with connecting with one's spirit."
"My God is not a religious God. My God is nature, my God is everything there is. That's God. Everything is God. I'm a child of that."
"No matter how hidden the cruelty, no matter how far off the screams of pain and terror, we live in one world. We are one people."
"I don't focus on criticism. I prefer to praise people and the world, rather than criticize them and it."