“I have sometimes wondered also whether in people like me who come to the boil fast (soupe au lait, the French call this trait, like a milk soup that boils over) the tantrum is not a built-in safety valve against madness or illness. ... The fierce tension in me, when it is properly channeled, creates the good tension for work. But when it becomes unbalanced I am destructive. How to isolate that good tension is my problem these days. Or, put in another way, how to turn the heat down fast enough so the soup won't boil over!”
Quote collection
People Quotes — page 1111 of 5018
“People are always talking about the joys of youth-but, oh, how youth can suffer!”
“If I'm the people's poet, then I ought to be in people's hands - and, I hope, in their heart.”
“Most people don't grow up. It's too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older.”
“I certainly do not adore the writer's discipline. I have lost lovers, endangered friendships, and blundered into eccentricity, impelled by a concentration which usually is to be found only in the minds of people about to be executed in the next half hour.”
“By no amount of agile exercising of a wistful imagination could my mother have been called lenient. Generous she was; indulgent never. Kind, yes, permissive, never. In her world, people she accepted paddled their own canoes, pulled their own weight, put their own shoulders to their own plows and pushed like hell.”
“I write because I am a Black woman, listening attentively to her people.”
“I suggest that the great art belongs to all people, all the time--that indeed it is made for the people, by the people, to the people.”
“People trying to separate people rather than bring us together... please. You don't just see it in America. It's all over the world.”
“I believe what I have to say is important, and I believe the people coming to hear me are important, and so the occasion of itself alone has an importance, which forces me to stare down my nerves.”
“Listen carefully to what country people call mother wit. In those homely sayings are couched the collective wisdom of generations.”
“People feel guilty. And guilt is stymieing. Guilt immobilizes. Guilt closes the air ducts and the veins, and makes people ignorant.”
“When people see the laughing face, even if they're jealous of it, their burden is lightened. But do it first for yourself. Laugh and dare to try to love somebody, starting with yourself.”
“When I forgive other people, I let them go, I free them from my ignorance. And as soon as I do, I feel lighter, brighter and better.”
“I'm sorry to say that when some people get to age 50, they say, "Well, that's the end, I'll never have to do sex again." They lay down first and get up last! But in your sixties, everything is sweeter. You have more time.”
“I pray for humility because that comes from inside out. And what humility does for one, is it reminds us that there are people before me. I have already been paid for. And what I need to do is prepare myself so that I can pay for someone else who has yet to come, but who may be here and needs me.”
“People who cannot feel punish those who do.”
“people in great trouble don't change to other people. They only change to themselves.”
“I think I've always had an activist stance, yet at the same time, the other side of me - and this is where some people just don't get it, or they'd prefer it if the work was a lot uglier, a lot louder - I have this personality where I just want to put something out that's a fact and then let you interpret it. It's almost as if you might barely notice it, you might walk right by it, but you have to pay attention.”
“war is not just a victory or loss ... People die.”