Quotes About Experience

So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment.

There's two things everybody got to find out for theyselves; they got to find out about love, and they got to find out about living.

you needs uh man." Janie laughed at all these well-wishers because she knew that they knew plenty of women alone; that she was not the first one they had ever seen. But most of the others were poor. Besides she liked being lonesome for a change. This freedom feeling was fine. These men didn't represent a thing she wanted to know about. She had already experienced them...

They, the men, were saving with the mind what they lost with the eye.

It's uh known fact, Pheoby, you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo' papa and yo' mama and nobody else can't tell yuh and show yuh. 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.

Through this publication, Barracoon extends our knowledge of and understanding about the experiences of Africans prior to their disembarkation into the Americas. Like a relic pulled up from the bottom of the ocean floor, Barracoon speaks to us of survival and persistence. It recalls the disremembered and gives an account for the unaccounted. As an expression of the feelings and attitudes of one who survived the Middle Passage, it is rare in the annals of history.

It connected itself with other vaguely felt matters that had struck her outside observation and buried themselves in her flesh.

mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods—come and gone with the sun.

They, the men, were saving with the mind what they lost with the eye. The women took the faded shirt and muddy overalls and laid them away for remembrance.

If they wants to see and know, why they don't come kiss and be kissed? Ah could then sit down and tell 'em things. Ah been a delegate to de big 'ssociation of life. Yessuh! De Grand Lodge, de big convention of livin' is just where Ah been dis year and a half y'all ain't seen me.

Time makes everything old so the kissing, young darkness became a monstropolous old thing while Janie talked.

Thank yuh, ma'am, but don't say you'se ole. You'se uh lil girl baby all de time. God made it so you spent yo' ole age first wid somebody else, and saved up yo' young girl days to spend wid me.

Besides she liked being lonesome for a change. This freedom feeling was fine. These men didn't represent a thing she wanted to know about. She had already experienced them through Logan and Joe. She felt like slapping some of them for sitting around grinning at her like a pack of cheesy cats, trying to make out they looked like love.

So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.

Now, dat's how everything wuz, Pheoby, jus' lak Ah told yuh. So Ah'm back home agin and Ah'm satisfied tuh be heah. Ah done been tuh de horizon and back and now Ah kin set heah in mah house and live by comparisons.

Funny thing, he said sitting in Zeke's kitchen with his wife, things dat happened long time uhgo used to seem way off, but now it all seems lak it wuz yistiddy. You think it's dead but de past ain't stopped breathin' yet.

It gave me something to feel about.

Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

Ah was wid dem white chillun so much till Ah didn't know Ah wuzn't white till Ah was round six years old.

They don't know if life is a mess of cornmeal dumplings, and if love is a bed-quilt!

I was learning things in school rather than learning how to teach myself, which is what you have to do in life, so I just abandoned it and did ceramics for a year and a half.

I was up above it. Now, I'm down in it.

An experience abroad really enriches you.

A lot of the time when I'm working, I'm abroad.