Quotes from Alice Randall

He reached across the table and put both his cold hands on my face. Those hands that had—what did he say?—"opened doors of perception and windows of imagination and broken shackles of anxiety" were soft.

Swellegant is glamour, power, originality, and more. Swellegant is graceful power completely unaligned with God or this world's ethics. Swellegant is bursting with the pagan joy and pagan pleasure of being beautiful and fruitful.

Some people are so sweet you can't hold the thought of them and trouble in the same mind at the same time.

Nothing shines brighter than Black polished right.

particular kind of proud when they walk into a bar if they think about Bullock and all he knew about altering perception to improve reality.

something make a man crawl over glass and fire to get to again after he get to it once

I have only had one better name than Santa Claus. And it was not Ziggy. It was not Joe Ziggy, it was not Stanley or Livingstone, Brother, Son, Nephew, Friend, or Mr. Johnson. I have loved all those names. My best name is Daddy.

She was Detroit born, and Detroit bred, and when she died, she'd be Detroit-dead. She might not have much, but she had enough.

There are facts can poison you dead as arsenic. I have long known this to be true. There are facts can get you drunker than sipping whiskey straight.

love is the strut and hate is the stumble.

caramel Camelot.

Folks that don't understand that our safety is born of their not seeing who we are and what we are, as long as we see ourselves clearly and understand that their chatter about us is fully ignorant and not to be considered.

Detroit Art Institute Museum the

Regular Saints Day Books don't do a thing about helping you make a feast. They just tell you on what day to do it. I'm not telling you exactly on what day to have your cocktail—but I am instructing you exactly how to make it, thanks to one of my favorite Saints, Thomas Bullock.

Black Bottom is walking tall, chin up, fist balled, brain firing on all cylinders. Black Bottom folk got steel in their spines, steel in their jaws, and steel in their will. But it wasn't always an attitude. Before it was razed, it was a place.

I wanted to slap Miss Priss. Slap her hard. But I didn't do it. It always been this way with me. I'll call another girl bitch before you blink, but I don't like to hit a woman. I guess it always felt like too much of a man to do it. Strange enough. Strength always seemed to rob the girl out of me, so I always take care to keep it hid.

me if everything was all right. I replied, "Everything's copacetic." And it was in fact "copacetic"—our word for "fine and dandy.

After Basie married his Katie, she became one of the sidditiest of siddity sisters.

What did it mean if I helped one, if I helped twelve, twelve hundred, or closer to twelve thousand Black girls feel their own beauty, their own worthiness, exactly as they are—when one hundred thousand Black girls stared and listened mesmerized when every billboard and television show screamed they were not beautiful, they were not worthy?

King's best speeches end with a wish for inclusiveness, his wish for a place where brown, Black, white, and yellow play together and are judged by their character. I have created that place now, today, but to do it I had to throw all the white people out.