Black quotes
3.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside black — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I do not remember-that is the point-the first impulse that pumped and shoved most of the earlier poems along, and they are still too near me, with their vehement beat-pounding black and green rhythms like those of a very young policeman exploding, for me to see the written evidence of it."
"There was a reason for the cost of those perfectly plain black dresses."
"[Black people] come into the world exactly like you. It's just that there are circumstances in the culture that are dictated and put on our lives that we have to fight against."
"I used to want to be the black dude in 'The Last Dragon.' I wanted to be Ralph Tresvant from New Edition - I thought he was super cool."
"Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns is an American masterpiece, a stupendous literary success that channels the social sciences as iconic biography in order to tell a vast story of a people's reinvention of itself and of a nation-the first complete history of the Great Black Migration from start to finish, north, east, west."
"At least I get my little black dress cleaned once in awhile."
"I don't go and study other folks. I come from where I came from, as a kid, in the little black church I grew up in. And some of the things they did I rejected, because I could see that it was a manipulation and an exaggeration. My struggle is never to fool folks; to keep it authentic - who we are and who we are becoming - rather than to mimic or to translate what others do into my own terms."
"All the girls in the industry are really all about making different the norm. Everyone really wants that to stop being a movement and start being normal. It shouldn't be a movement when someone casts a bunch of black girls, or a girl who isn't the typical size, or someone with freckles. It should be an everyday thing."
"An unfinished coffin on black tressels, which stood in the middle of the shop, looked so gloomy and death-like that a cold tremble came over him, every time his eyes wandered in the direction of the dismal object: from which he almost expected to see some frightful form slowly rear its head, to drive him mad with terror."
"The writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of reeducation and regeneration that must be done. In fact, he should march right in front."
"As Believers, we shine brightest in a sad and dark world; like a diamond that illuminates best when placed on black velvet."
"When you're white, the sky's the limit. When you're black, the limit's the sky."
"If you see a black woman with an overweight white man, you know she got effed up credit!"
"See, the Black man gotta fly to get to something the white man can walk to."
"Black comics, they only watch Black comedians. You're a comedian; you're not just a Black comedian. You're a comedian. I try to get that through to everybody."
"I love seeing black people do normal things, being judged as normal people."
"His pear-shaped head, I could now see, was situated on top of a pear-shaped body, which his black gown caused to resemble a piece of fruit going to a funeral."
"These days I find myself wanting to avoid being pigeon-holed, ghettoized, held in a different category than other authors. And when people ask me if I'm a black writer, or just a writer who happens to be black, I tend to say that it's either a dumb question or a question which happens to be dumb."
"The Oscars are this Sunday. Host Neil Patrick Harris said he hopes the broadcast will include a 'Kanye moment.' Unfortunately a Kanye moment may not be possible because that would require a black person to be at the Oscars."
"The wonderful thing about the black church for me is that it forces you to come to terms with the centrality of love in the world."
