Quotes from Ntozake Shange

I remember that my mother used to take me to see ballets, especially if there were black people in them.

There was nothing to aspire to, no one to honor. Sojourner Truth wasn't a big enough role model for me. I couldn't go around abolishing slavery.

When I die, I will no be guilty of having left a generation of girls behind thinking that anyone can tend to their emotional health other than themselves.

I had - there were three strokes, and I lost my ability to read and write and speak, and it really put me by the wayside for a number of years.

I think art is a healing force, and if we give in to the joy that can be found in art, then we are able to sustain ourselves in spite of ourselves.

If anything is life-changing, being the descendant of a slave is.

Our society allows people to be absolutely neurotic and totally out of touch with their feelings and everyone else's feelings, and yet be very respectable.

Spell-check ruins my work. It fixes all my slang and dialect into standard English. So I'm caught in a tangle of technology that feels very foreign to me.

It still amazes and fascinates me that women of color have kept my work alive for these many generations.

When I die, I will not be guilty of having left a generation of girls behind thinking that anyone can tend to their emotional health other than themselves.

There was quite a ruckus about the seven ladies in their simple colored dresses. I was truly dumbfounded that I was, right then and there, deemed the biggest threat to black men since cotton pickin', and not all women were in my corner, either.

I was constantly being sought after for money. And the vitriol that came my way from many who felt threatened by controversial aspects of 'for colored girls' was often frightening.

I was chastised for writing several obituaries for Malcolm X, exploring different aspects of his writing. One teacher in particular told me, didn't I think I was beating a dead horse? and dismissively threw my paper on my desk.

White people use their literature to maintain culture. That's why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.

Sisterhood is important because we are all we have to stand on. We have to stand near and by each other, pray for one another, and share the joys and the difficulties that women face in the world today. If we don't talk about it among ourselves, then we are made silent by the patriarchy, and that serves us no purpose.

i found god in myself and i loved her i loved her fiercely

Before I went to college, I went to the S.N.C.C. office three times a week to offer my services and catch up on my 'Liberator' magazine. The other two days, I went to the Lycee Francais to keep my French crisp. I felt comfortable in the diversity of my worlds.

Art gives us the opportunity to have clarity as well as hope that we might be able to survive a situation, or hope that we can find a way out of it without too much more injury to ourselves.

I hadn't published a book of poetry in over a decade because I've been very ill. As I got better and started to write, I said, 'Wow, even as an old woman, I could have a selected book of poems.'

I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager... and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that.

I write for young girls of color, for girls who don't even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive. I can only change how they live, not how they think.

My family moved around a lot, so I don't have any friends that I had all my life, but I did have annual trips back to Queens.

Luckily, my father and my mother liked us to talk, so they encouraged us to talk, so that the girls in my house, they're all very powerful speakers and powerful agents of their own will, as is my brother.

Multiculturalism isn't about culture, it's about power.