Quotes from baraka amiri ii

Hope is delicate suffering.

We did take the city away from the lowest level, and if the next level is sickening, the task is of a higher order.

What was most important about the survivors was our will to be more than those streets proposed.

The games and sports of the playground and streets was one registration carried with us as long as we live. Our conduct, strategies, and tactics, our ranking and comradeship. Our wins and losses.

Growing up was a maze of light and darkness to me. I never fully understood the purpose of childhood. Baby pictures nonplussed me. It looks like me a little, I thought. But what the hell, I didn't know nuthin'. It ain't that cute. Falling back like that, toothless grimace, mouth bare, legs bent, fat with diapers. And them probably wet.

I am inside someone who hates me. I look out from his eyes.

The reason for the remarkable development of the rhythmic qualities of African music can certainly be traced to the fact that Africans also used drums for communication; and not, as was once thought, merely by using the drums in a kind of primitive Morse code, but by the phonetic reproduction of the words themselves--the result being that Africans developed an extremely fine and extremely complex rhythmic sense.

I heard heroes and saw them in my mind and imagined what evil was and cheered at its destruction. In the movies too, in film after film, evil could be destroyed.

All the lovely things I've known have disappeared.