There ain’t no time for foolishness now. You in it now. You got to stay in it.
God I am looking for the one thing I have never felt but once, and I would walk through heaven and earth to find it, if he would but let me find him, so that I could feel it; and if I were to feel it again I would never leave that feeling, or him that gave it to me.” – The Dreamer.
I was ashamed of my mother, but see, love didn’t come natural to me until I became a Christian.- Ruth McBride.
The enemy was irony and truth and hypocrisy, that was the real enemy. That was the enemy that was killing him.
Listen, don’t meet your heroes. If you meet your heroes, you’re always going to be disappointed.
I wouldn’t throw her outta bed for eating crackers. She was all class.
If I ever see you again, I’ll send your ass hooting and hollering out my damn door.
A body can’t prosper if a person don’t know who they are. That makes you poor as a pea, not knowing who you are inside. That’s worse than being anything in the world on the outside.
God is the color of water. Water doesn’t have a color.
It was always so hot, and everyone was so polite, and everything was all surface but underneath it was like a bomb waiting to go off. I always felt that way about the South, that beneath the smiles and southern hospitality and politeness were a lot of guns and liquor and secrets.
I come to the understanding that maybe what was on the inside was more important, and that your outer covering didn’t count so much as folks thought it did, colored or white, man or woman.
I felt like a Tinker toy kid building my own self out of one of those toy building sets; for as she laid her life before me, I reassembled the tableau of her words like a picture puzzle, and as I did, so my own life was rebuilt.
I think a lot of the history we’ve read up to this point, some of it is just off. It’s written with the same prejudice that certain networks have when they report the news of the day.
Educate yourself or you’ll be a nobody!
My black friends never asked me how much money I made, or what school my children went to, or anything like that. They just said, “Come as you are.”
My whole family was – we grew up in New York, but all my relatives and all my father and stepfather’s family, they were all from the South. So I like that old Black voice, and I love the sort of old Black man with a corncob pipe, sitting there telling a whopper.
So sweet and precious is family life.
Sometimes it seemed like the truth was a bandy-legged soul who dashed from one side of the world to the other and I could never find him.
God gived you the seed. But the watering and caring of that seed is up to you.
The man was the finest preacher. He could make a frog stand up straight and get happy with Jesus.