Quotes from Toni Cade Bambara

Revolution begins with the self, in the self.

She [my mother] gave me permission to wonder, to dawdle, to daydream.

Our lives preserved. How it was and how it will be. Passing it along in the relay. That is what I work to do: to produce stories that save our lives.

Medication without explanation is obscene.

Take away the miseries and you take away some folks' reason for living.

I've never been convinced that experience is linear, circular, or even random. It just is. I try to put it in some kind of order to extract meaning from it, to bring meaning to it.

And what is religion, you might ask. It's a technology of living.

People have to be given permission to write, and they have to be given space to breathe and stumble. They have to be given time to develop and to reveal what they can do.

The dream is real, my friends. The failure to realize it is the only unreality.

The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.

My responsibility to myself, my neighbors, my family and the human family is to try to tell the truth.

I try to live [the Golden Rule] and I certainly expect it of some particular others. But I'll be damned if I want most folk out there to do unto me what they do unto themselves.

The most effective way to do it, is to do it.

The dream is real, my friends. The failure to realize it is the only reality.

Reappraise the past, reevaluate where we've been, clarify where we are, and predict or anticipate where we are headed.

When you dream, you dialogue with aspects of yourself that normally are not with you in the daytime and you discover that you know a great deal more than you thought you did.

I'll be damned if I want most folks out there to do unto me what they do unto themselves.

The dream is real, my friends. The failure to make it work is the unreality.

Our lives preserved. How it was; and how it be. Passing it along in the relay. That is what I work to do: to produce stories that save our lives.

All writers, musicians, artists, choreographers/dancers, etc., work with the stuff of their experiences. It's the translation of it, the conversion of it, the shaping of it that makes for the drama.

The story is a piece of work. The novel is a way of life.

The dream is real, my friends. The failure to realize it is the only unreality.

And what is religion, you might ask. It's a technology of living.

Take away the miseries and you take away some folks' reason for living.