The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul.
Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.
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.
Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain’t. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up the flowers, wind, water, a big rock.
Everything want to be loved.
Who am I to tell her who to love? My job just to love her good and true myself. P. 237.
And I thank God let me gain understanding enough to know love can’t be halted just cause some peoples moan and groan. P.238.
His little whistle sound like it lost way down a jar, and the jar in the bottom of the creek. P. 64.
Sofia the kind of woman no matter what she have in her hand she make it look like a weapon.
All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could.
I can’t fix my mouth to say how I feel.
Let ’im hear me, I say. If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you.
And when they spy on us let them discover us loving.
When I offered the word “Womanism” many years ago, it was to give us a tool to use, as feminist women of color, in times like these. These are the moments we can see clearly, and must honor devotedly, our singular path as women of color in the United States. We are not white women and this truth has been ground into us for centuries, often in brutal ways.
The years have come and gone without a single word from you. Only the sky above us do we hold in common. I look at it often as if, somehow, reflected from its immensities, I will one day find myself gazing into your eyes.
Every stitch i sew will be a kiss.
Without money of one’s own in a capitalist society, there is no such thing as independence.
What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one’s glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. And yet, in our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins.
When Toni Morrison said she writes the kind of books she wants to read, she was acknowledging the fact that in a society in which “accepted literature” is so often sexist and racist and otherwise irrelevant or offensive to so many lives, she must do the work of two. She must be her own model as well as the artist attending, creating, learning from, realizing the model, which is to say, herself.