Quotes from Alice Randall

Mother-love is not inevitable. The good mother is a great artist ever creating beauty out of chaos

Sometimes when almost everything is wrong, one thing is so right you would do it all again.

Sometimes when almost everything is wrong, one thing is so right you would do it all again.

Life plots elegantly.

God doesn't give a man anything more precious than a good woman.

When a good man loves a good woman, God smiles. When a good man loves a good woman, God smiles so broad and bright that the angel guarding the gate to Eden puts down his fiery sword. I've been to busy to get to Eden. What kind of man is too busy to make God smile?

We are taught to think ourselves ugly. Eyes are an assaulted sense. We are taught to behave by spankings and whippings. Touch is an assaulted sense. We are taught we should not smell, or we smell wrong. Smell is an assaulted sense. We listen to songs that call us 'hos and tell us how to give blow jobs. Hearing is an assaulted sense. Taste, not so much.

All the different ways of talking English I throw together like a salad and dine greedily in my mongrel tongue.

True love is a preview of heaven, and you do what you got to, to get it.

Love, Ada thought out on the lake that first spring afternoon, is largely a matter of paying attention and good timing.

A man another woman can steal from you ain't your man no way

Don't stop short of your goal

It has been estimated that one-third of the 139 square miles designated "Detroit" is now vacant-land-prairie. That's crime.

The front of my head feels like a house, and the thoughts reside within different set places that I can rearrange like furniture, but mostly I don't. I come from a furniture-dodging tribe. We tiptoe around the pieces as they remain in place. I'm thinking that way again. Strange, the small things that make us proud.

1952 there were over 700 cases of polio in Detroit. Dr. Bodywork Bob had told me that. I told Rouse; he bogeyed a hole. Polio was hitting families all over town, white and colored, rich and poor, center of the city and suburbs.

Autumn is the season when you know what's coming next is harder than what is now. In pale spring you look forward to bright summer; in hot summer to the cool of fall; in winter to the hope of spring. In fall, you watch what you have blow away.

We were in Venice at the time of the revels before Lent. I went into the plaza wearing a mask and hood. I saw a pretty girl, dark skin, dark eyes. She smelled strong of fish and capers and fried artichokes. I kissed her for Beauty's sake. For Lady's sake. Behind the veil of the mask, in the old Jewish Quarter, I kissed her, kissed her, and didn't cry, because I know one day I will die. And I will not rise again.

It is past time everyone sees Negro girls can be touched by white hands without lust or anger. If Martha loses her show, that is nothing compared to what Negro girls lose every day when people don't understand that.

In Detroit we understand the phrase "Affirmative Action" a little different than they do in the rest of the world. In Detroit it means: Take a step, don't step back, don't talk, don't wait—act! Knock your brother upside his head and drag him through the water, but save his life. Affirmative action is a lifesaving dance.

Catherine Fowler has a car so pretty that if she drove it back down to her little town in Mississippi, they would hang the car. John White noticed. John White said, "You called out an ambition hidden in every lynching: a desire to slaughter our beauty. Ofays are made crazy by our beauty." I have committed to be beautiful as often and as publicly as I can. And I have determined to help more of mine see and be their beauty. John White conspired with me to achieve this.

To feel the sun and see the orange light leak through the skin of my eyelids is copacetic-squared. Sight

We were copacetic.

In reality St. Louis is located in a segregated South, filthy with paddleboat gambling, river mud, and hot white hate.

What I liked least about the Plantation Club? They plastered caricatures of us, drawings of darkies with protruding lips and gawking eyes on every matchbook, napkin, menu, and newspaper advertisement associated with or in the Plantation Club. Why? I suspect they hoped their filthy-as-homemade-sin visual lies would inoculate white folk from the shock of Black beauty. That left me, and many of the rest of the entertainers, exodusing for the inner sanctum of drunk.