Quotes from Toni Cade Bambara

Two hundred pounds of grief and heft if she was one-fifty. Bless her heart, just a babe of the times. Wants to be smiling and feeling good all the time. Smooth sailing as they lower the mama into the ground. Then there's you. What's your story?

Keep the focus on the action not the institution; don't confuse the vehicle with the objective; all cocoons are temporary and disappear

Cause love won't let you let'm go." "But they want to go, that's the hurting part." "Like you tole the lap sitter this morning, Min, when you hurt, hurt. But when you see the chirren calling down thunder and going up in flames, Min. Why then you snatch you a blanket

Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation." ? Toni Cade Bambara, born #OTD in 1939

So I deal in straight-up fiction myself, cause I value my family and friends, and mostly cause I lie a lot anyway.

The reliability of stools? Solids, liquids, gases, the dance of atoms, the bounce and race of molecules, ethers, electrical charges. The eyes and habits of illusion. Retinal images, bogus images, traveling to the brain. The pupils trying to tell the truth to the inner eye. The eye of the heart. The eye of the head. The eye of the mind. All seeing differently.

She wasn't meant for these scenes, wasn't meant to be sitting up there in the Southwest Community Infirmary with her ass out, in the middle of the day, and strangers cluttering up the treatment room, ogling her in her misery. She wasn't meant for any of it. But then M'Dear Sophie always said, "Find meaning where you're put, Vee." So she exhaled deeply and tried to relax and stick it out and pay attention.

The limits of binary thinking are spooky enough

Take away the miseries and you take away some folks' reason for living. Their conversation piece anyway.

Like I use to tell my daughter's daddy, the key to getting along and living with other folks is to keep clear whose weight is whose.

That's the problem with friends sometimes, they invest in who you were or seem to have been, capture you and you're through. Forget what you had in mind about changing, growing, developing. Got you typecasted.

The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible

An artist represents an oppressed people and makes revolution irresistible.

It's a dismally lonely business, writing.

TAKE HEART TO FLAT OUT DECIDE TO BE WELL AND STRIDE INTO THE FUTURE, SANE AND WHOLE