Quotes About Blackness

The history of blackness is also a history of erasure.

There was no light. The darkness was deep and there was no dazzle.

Eyes closed, I saw only the blackness, reminding me of this one thing, the most deep of my secrets; eyes open, there was only the world that didn't know it, bright, inescapable, and somehow, still there.

The Great Malevolence had been squatting in the blackness for a very long time. He was there billions of years before people, or dinosaurs, or small, single-celled organisms that decided one day to become larger, multicelled organisms so they could, at some point in the future, invent literature, painting, and annoying ring tones for cell phones.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

My work is often a therapy for myself - a working out of these issues as a black woman. And a way of allowing other black women to work through this kind of stigmatization as they look through the images and feel how distorted or contorted they might be in the public eye.

Sus ojos seguían fijos en la luz declinante y en la creciente oscuridad. Esa negrura preternatural que parece decir a la más luminosa y sublime obra de Dios: «Déjame el sitio; acaba ya de brillar».

If our culture is so often readily and easily appropriated, imagine what happens when we embrace our full blackness and know that our contributions are just as important to the shaping of the country and, more broadly, the world.

Weather forecast for tonight: dark.

The little light he possessed spread its beams so narrowly, that frustrated belief was a curtain broad enough to create for him the blackness of night.

When you get just a complete sense of blackness or void ahead of you, that somehow the future looks an impossible place to be, and the direction you are going seems to have no purpose, there is this word despair which is a very awful thing to feel.

I think it must have been my mothers plan to rupture this bright surface, to sail beneath into very blackness, but here she was, wherever my eyes fell, and behind my eyes, whole and in fragments, a thousand images of one gesture, never dispelled but rising always, inevitably, like a drowned woman.

concise mode of expressing the same meaning is, that inseparable accidents are properties which are universal to the species, but not necessary to it. Thus, blackness is an attribute of a crow

People ask me why my figures have to be so black. There are a lot of reasons. First, the blackness is a rhetorical device. When we talk about ourselves as a people and as a culture, we talk about black history, black culture, black music. That's the rhetorical position we occupy.

Anyone reading contemporary poetry - especially contemporary African-American poetry - will quickly see that race is an enduring subject. What some don't realize is just how diverse the handling of that subject is. It's as diverse as blackness.

It would probably be quite easy to extract a sort of beauty, as Arnold Bennett did, from the blackness of the industrial towns; one can easily imagine Baudelaire, for instance, writing a poem about a slag-heap. But the beauty or ugliness of industrialism hardly matters.

Our blackness and how to survive being black in America was something that our parents instilled in us extraordinarily well.

The horizon was beginning to charcoal. What was left of the blackness above was nothing now but a scribble, and disappearing fast.

Night gives a black look to everything, whatever it may be.

we came from blackness, it seems logical to assume that it's to blackness we return.

I love the night passionately... I love it with all my senses: I love to see it, I love to breathe it in, I love to open my ears to its silence, I love my whole body to be caressed by its blackness.

But let us be careful! We are speaking of ourselves. If this art is degenerate, we too are degenerate, for innumerable individuals are suffering the same collapse of the cultural canon, the same alienation, the same loneliness – the rising blackness with its shadow and devouring dragon. The disintegration and dissonance of this art are our own; to understand them is to understand ourselves.

Slavery, in other words, founded and fixed the meaning of blackness more than any transparent and transhistorical meaning of black skin founded the category of slavery.

The fear which troubles the life of man from its deepest depths, suffuses all with the blackness of death, and leaves no delight clean and pure.