Quotes About Community

Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

It was lovely. Not to be stared at, not seen, but being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other.

I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.

We were two throats and one eye and we had no price.

The idea of a wanton woman is something I have inserted into almost all of my books. An outlaw figure who is disallowed in the community because of her imagination or activity or status — that kind of anarchic figure has always fascinated me.

In the safe harbor of each other's company they could afford to abandon the ways of other people and concentrate on their own perceptions of things.

I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.

Together they stood in the doorway. For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words.

When good people take you in and treat you good, you ought to try to be good back.

Not being at home in one's homeland; [...] being exiled in the place one belongs.

Homelessness has been recharacterized as streetlessness. Not the poor deprived of homes, but the homed being deprived of their streets.

For a nickel a month, Lady Jones did what whitepeople thought unnecessary if not illegal: crowded her little parlor with the colored children who had time for and interest in book learning.

We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writer's movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious.

Nothing in this world loves a black man more than another black man. You hear of solitary white men, but niggers? Can't stay away from one another a whole day. So. It looks to me like you the envy of the world.

I'm a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I'm also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and an American, plus I'm an African-American, and a woman. I know it seems like I'm spreading like algae when I put it this way, but I'd like to think of the prize being distributed to these regions and nations and races.

And then she knew. Her friends and neighbors were angry at her because she had overstepped, given too much, offended them by excess.

Kalabal?klar içinde olmak isteyenler yaln?zl?k çekenlerdir hep.

Do what you please in the City, it is there to back and frame you no matter what you do.

Pauline, what would you do if your own brother had a party and didn't invite you?' I said ifn I really wanted to go to that party, I reckoned I'd go anyhow. Never mind what he want. She just sucked her teeth a little and made out like what I said was dumb. All the while I was thinking how dumb she was. Whoever told her that her brother was her friend? Folks can't like folks just 'cause they has the same mama.

When you get these jobs you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.

How come everybody run off from Sweet Home can't stop talking about it? Look like if it was so sweet you would have stayed. Girl who you talking to? Paul D laughed. True, true. She's right, Sethe. It wasn't sweet and it sure wasn't home. He shook his head. But it's where we were, said Sethe. All together. Comes back whether we want it to or not.

I want to do good work. I want to be involved in other people's doing good work.

To use folk language, vernacular in a manner neither exotic nor comic, neither minstrelized nor microscopically analyzed.

Even the educated colored: the long-schooled people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of the whole race sitting there.