Quotes from Marita Golden

It was important, I know, for my father as a product of his times not to be vulnerable, so he chose, and I can't say that I blame him, to live his life rather than create it.

To my father, who told me the stories that matter. To my mother, who taught me to remember them.

My life is too important to share with someone who can't understand it.

Everything I have learned about love, I learned from my mother. For it is mothers who bend, twist, flex, and break most dramatically before our uninitiated eyes. Fathers bear, conceal, inflict, sometimes vanish, so the mythology of domestic union tells us. But mothers absorb, accept, give in, all to tutor daughters in the syntax, the grammar of yearning and love.

We knew no one man had killed the prophet. Rather, the combined weight of racism and an absence of moral courage had crushed him. A constitution ignored, laws denied, these were the weapons. America pulled the trigger.

The symbiotic relationship between reading and writing is a cornerstone of our individual intellectual journey and our educational system. We write as an act of self-expression. We read because language renders unto us the vitality of real and imagined experience.

The current Pandora's box of revelations about sexual crimes committed within the walls of so many of America's families reveals the nuclear family to be cruelly, aptly named. Patriarchy, sexism, and the culture of capitalism have created a family that too often is no more than a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.

The day I stood in front of the mirror and saw and loved my face and my hair for the first time in my life I was alone--completely utterly alone. We are always alone when we find the truth. The fact that we are alone makes the taste of affirmation no less sweet.

I also remembered that love and commitment can flourish without a wedding ring. Neither a ceremony nor sharing the key to the same house is a guarantee of readiness to give of oneself and to be fully open to another, which is what the bonds of real love entail. Quiet as it's kept, love is not easily defined, quickly mastered, or nonchalantly tossed aside.

African-American history is so much more than the Middle Passage, assassinated prophets, a catalog of the dead and dying, the imprisoned and the failing among us. The human spirit is never summed up or adequately captured by a litany only of its weakness, confusion, and fear.

Kupenda KWAME ALEXANDER I have never been a slave Yet, I know I am whipped I have never escaped underground Yet, the night knows my journey I have never been to Canada Yet I've crossed your border If I were a poet in love I'd say that with you I have found that new place Where romance is just a beginning And freedom is our end.

Novelists have to love humanity to write anything worthwhile. Poets have to love themselves.

Love is going to replace life and from then on it's all smooth sailing. Love will replace life.

I am a stranger to half measures.