Quotes About Individuality

Then you must tell 'em dat love ain't somethin' lak uh grindstone dat's de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.

pay no attention to what I say about love, for as I said before, it may not mean a thing. It is my own bathtub singing. Just because my mouth opens up like a prayer book, it does not just have to flap like a Bible.

It was bad enough for white people, but when one of your own color could be so different: it put you in a wonder.

Two things everybody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves.

She must look on herself as the bell-cow, the other women were the gang.

No, we will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual. If you haven't got it, you can't show it. If you have got it, you can't hide it. That is one of the strongest laws God ever made.

I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background. For instance at Barnard. Beside the waters of the Hudson I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.

I fail to see where it would have been more uplifting for them to have been inside a church listening to a man urging them to "contemplate the sufferings of our Lord," which is just another way of punishing one's self for nothing. It is very much better for them to climb the rocks in their bare clean feet and meet Him face to face in their search for the eternal in beauty.

Once, when they used to set their mouths in what they thought was the Boston Crimp, and ask me about the differences between the ordinary Negro and "the better-thinking Negro", I used to show my irritation by saying I did not know who the better-thinking Negro was. I knew who the think-they-are-better Negroes were, but who were the better thinkers was another matter.

Dey gointuh make 'miration 'cause mah love didn't work lak they love, if dey ever had any. Then you must tell 'em dat love ain't somethin' lak uh grindstone dat's de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.

It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. I feel no need for such. However, I would not, by word or deed, attempt to deprive another of the consolation it affords. It is simply not for me. Somebody else may have my rapturous glance at the archangels. The springing of the yellow line of morning out of the misty deep of dawn is glory enough for me.

She had found a jewel down inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people could see her and gleam it around.

You tries tuh be so much-knowin'. You got tuh learn how tuh speak when you spokin to, come when youse called. Ah ain't got tuh do but two things--stay black and die, Sister Berry snapped.

Ah'm uh bitch's baby round lady people.

Lawd, look at Tookie switchin' it and lookin' back at it! She's done gone crazy thru de hips.

Tea Cake love me in blue, so Ah wears it. Jody ain't never in his life picked out no color for me.

The villagers said that John Redding was a queer child.

Put dat in yo' pipe and smoke it.

Zora, why do you think dese li'l slim women was put on earth? Couldn't tell you to save my life. Well, dese slim ones was put here to beautify de world. De big ones, musta been put here for de same reason. Ah, naw, Zora. Ah don't agree wid you there. Well then, what was they put here for? To show dese slim girls how far they kin stretch without bustin'.

I have this deep and abiding faith in God. But this does not mean that you have to have a religion or follow somebody.

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, 'Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!'

I think that's the beauty of living in America, right? We all get our own opinion, and no one opinion is absolute.

It was hard for me to find my voice because I was, for so long, absorbed in my own world.

Actually, I love the Abstract Expressionists - or I like the ones I like, anyway.