Quotes About Identity

the ghetto should never come with a photo. The Third World slum is a nightmare that defies beliefs or facts, even the ones staring right at you. A vision of hell that twists and turns on itself and grooves to its own soundtrack.

They like him better when he was the poor cousin that they can feel good for taking notice. I tell him that politician do the same thing to me when they realize me can read.

Like Jesus telling Judas To get it done already Me is you, Pilate me is you, Roman soldier You don't even know who your Judas was

see how the white womens goin' look and hear how white womens laugh in the colonies. She think of white flesh and black flesh, that really be brown flesh by blood and the two flesh melt into one flesh that don't know colour. Then Lilith wonder if she dreaming because dreaming is one thing God never allow negro to do.

Preacher says there is a god-shaped void in everybody life but the only thing ghetto people can fill a void with is void.

Everybody lives in their own Jamaica and damn if that was ever going to be mine.

Go to Hanover and take a name like Everton or Courtney or Fitzharold, a name that sound like both mother and father raise me.

the policeman move up the line saying, You can't fuck, go home. You can't fuck neither remove youself. You look like you can fuck, stay. You go, you go. Hold on, hold on now, you move like is you the one who getting the fucking. Batty boy, remove youself, and you, you better stay.

He will live to see them make him a national hero and he will die the only person thinking he had failed. That's what happens when you personify hopes and dreams in one person. He becomes nothing more than a literary device.

Homer whiter than plenty white man, it seem. But nothing make a nigger more black than whip scars. Lilith don't want none of it.

Y dijo: ¿sabes por qué me llaman Chistoso? Porque nunca estoy pa bromas.

But he starting to confuse representing people with owning them, and soon even he going need a reckoning.

He will live to see them make him a national hero and he will die the only person thinking he had failed. That's what happens when you personify hopes and dreams in one person.

Your light blacker than black. I know you.

He was not a dark man, but not light either. His color was a nebulous thing, so like his voice, which was too low to be weak but too reedy to be commanding. In a town that preferred things black or white, grayness such as his was not welcome.

My uncle rubbed his chin and looked at me. "You were born when you were found, and that is not even a moon. Do not rush to die so soon," he said. I did not tell him that I was a man already.

I goin' call her Lilith. You can call her what they call her.

Lilith have a quilt on her back, but there be a bigger quilt, a patchwork of negro bones that reach from the Africa to the West Indies.

What you looking at is the only way I don't feel like being me is labor, like I holding myself together all the time.

The fishes had the head, arms, and breasts of women.

To be a man you do as man do. Master one thing and you can fail at everything else, for to be a man is to fail at everything else. Here is the one thing. What men do in all things, more than anything, is take up space, whether he be priest, king, beggar, or hunter. Whether he be living or dead. More space than he need, and more space than he will use.

My personality permeates everything I do, including how I relate to God.

The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself

Un hombre puede cambiar su apariencia y su nombre, pero no puede cambiar su interior.