Quotes from Ernest J. Gaines

wanted to be there to say good-bye to him. No matter what a person does, there ought to be somebody on his side at the last moment.

No matter what you do, no matter how hard you work, how much you love, they catch you off guard one day and break you.

We've only been living in these ghettos for seventy-five years or so, but the other three hundred years -- I think this is worth writing about. I think we've made tremendous sacrifices, we've shown tremendous strength. In the ghetto you see a lot of frustration; you see very little strength.

I don't care what a man is. I mean, a great artist is like a great doctor. I don't care how racist he is. If he can show me how to operate on a heart so that I can cure a brother, or cure someone else, I don't give a damn what the man thinks; he has taught me something. And that is valuable to me. And that is valuable to others and man as a whole.

Well, in San Francisco if someone's against you, they know how to vote you out of an area. If someone's against you in Louisiana, or if I wrote a book and they did not like it or me in Louisiana, they might shoot me anytime.

Ain't we all been hurt by slavery?

So now it had started. Now they were going to give him a taste of what it meant to kill and then let yourself be bonded out of jail. They were going to let him know (not that they cared a hoot for the other boy) that he wasn't tough as he thought he was.

Writing is too goddamned hard for me to think about a soul in teh world ... I don't think about a soul, but just try to get those goddamned characters to act right.

Question everything. Every stripe, every star, every word spoken. Everything.

I hope when I die, they won't put on my tombstone, 'He wrote Miss Jane Pittman .' Put anything else, but don't put just that.

I like the sound of people's voices, and I think what a man says can very well tell what he's thinking, whether he's lying or not.

it look like the lord just work for wite folks

Tell Nannan I walked.

Go and be fish again.

I didn't want to show it. Because if what he was saying was true, there wasn't a thing I could do about it. Marshall was too big. If it was just Bonbon who wanted to hurt Marcus, you might be able to prevent that. Bonbon was nothing but a poor white man, and sometimes you could go to the rich white man for help. But where did you go when it was the rich white man? You couldn't even go to the law, because he was the law. He was police, he was judge, he was jury.

We must live with our own conscience. Each and every one of us must live with his own conscience.

And I thought to myself, What am I doing? Am I reaching them at all? They are acting exactly as the old men did earlier. They are fifty years younger, maybe more, but doing the same thing those old men did who never attended school a day in their lives. Is it just a vicious circle? Am I doing anything?

Why?" I kept on asking myself. "Why? Who is this boy and why?" I knew that white men bonded colored boys out of jail for a few hundred dollars and worked them until they had gotten all their money back two and three times over. But I was trying to figure out why Marshall Hebert would do this when he already had more people than he needed. Now I knew. This little old lady had the finger on him, too.

like Ned was killed. We made her go and we hired

The mark of fear is not easily removed.

had two reasons. Ned was by himself in this world, except for me, and I didn't want no man and no children spiting him just because he was an orphan. The other reason I never looked at a man, I was barren. An old woman on the place had told me that. I went to her one day and told her how my body act and didn't act. After we had sat down and talked a while, she said one word: "Barren." I went to a doctor and he told me the same thing: "You barren, all right.

My six words of advice to writers are: Read, read, read, write, write, write.

That's what life is about, doing as good as you can. When the times comes for them to lay you down in the long black hole, they can say one thing: 'He did as good as he could.' That's the best thing you can say for a man. Horse breaker or yard sweeper, let them say the poor boy did it good as he could.

It came from a piece of old wood that he found in the yard somewhere. That's what we all are, Jefferson, all of us on this earth, a piece of drifting wood, until we—each one of us, individually—decide to become something else. I am still that piece of drifting wood, and those out there are no better. But you can be better. Because we need you to be and want you to be.