Quotes About Struggle

The first thing a black man and a poor man learns is that trouble is all he's got so that's what he has to work with.

I gave my children the kind of dreams they could live by, but dreams are like oceans, Mr. McGill. If they're worth a damn they're bigger than the dreamer, and sometimes, when the one dreaming wants to be as big as what they imagine, the wave pulls'em down.

You know, the undersized genius had said, ain't no way in the world that black folks could'a done enough bad to call all them centuries'a pain down on our heads.

THAT WAS IT. A life worth remembering is hell to live.

Yeah. If you've never been knocked down, then you've never been in a fight.

Being challenged by the law was a rite of passage for any Negro who wanted to better himself or his situation.

Her experience in life was limited and so she fought battles in an imaginary arena

So I got up, went down to the number 1 train, and rode in a car full to brimming over with commuters going from the jobs that they didn't want back to the lives they hadn't bargained for.

I was living out the dream of emancipation—a free man in America, desperate for someone to rein me in.

It was a reminder that the most desperate battles are fought in our hearts and souls, and that death is only one final trick of the mind.

The question is,' John added, 'if a person inside a culture has no knowledge of his place in the unfolding of that culture, or in the history of any other people, and if no one else among either the oppressors or the oppressed has that knowledge, can that person be said to be alive? Indeed on what plane could he possibly exist except as chattel where he is a slave or not?

Somewhere along the way I had developed the feeling that I wasn't going to outlive the adventure I was having. There was no way out but to run, and I couldn't run, so I decided to milk all those white people for all the money they'd let go of. Money bought everything. Money paid the rent and fed the kitty. Money was why Coretta was dead and why DeWitt Albright was going to kill me. I got the idea, somehow, that if I got enough money then maybe I could buy my own life back.

I inhaled deeply, feeling of two minds about the benefits and detriments of smoking. On one hand, tobacco robbed me of my wind, but on the other, it gave me something to do while the devil was tempting me!

I wore death on my shoulder like a superheroes cape, but that didn't matter. I was going to fight the good fight and, win or lose, I'd be counted as a man who struggled against his own fate.

Two of the deacons were just boys. I guess they had to join a gang one way or another, and the church won out.

there was enough trouble in my trough; I'd save the reeducation of the white race for sometime later in the week.

Black men of our day were never told , the skies the limit. Our limits were more like the inner lid of a coffin.

I always talk about down home like it really was home. Like everybody who looked like me and talked like me really cared about me. I knew that life was hard, but I hoped that if someone stole from me it would be because they were hungry and needed it. But some people will tear you down just to see you fall. They'll do it even if your loss is their own.

Jackson couldn't fly straight down if you threw him off a cliff.

America was changing at a snail's pace in a high wind, but until that gastropod mollusk reached its destination I had a .45 in my pocket and eyes on all four corners at once.

Even as my body rotted and festered under the unblinking eyes of Clark Heinemann, the thoughts I had at death survived. One thousand unpublished stories, 26,473 rejection letters, and all those editorial twits that never gave me a break. The only thing left of me was a raging emotion at every publisher of every insignificant quarterly—but most of all, Clark Heinemann.

dreams are like oceans, Mr. McGill. If they're worth a damn they're bigger than the dreamer, and sometimes, when the one dreaming wants to be as big as what they imagine, the wave pulls'em down.

If there is to be any proving of our humanity it must be through revolutionary means.

Black people are here in these institutions as part of the development of black struggle, but only as a concession designed to incorporate us within the structure. [Besides the institution, he says] I am thinking also of the books, the references, the theoretical assumptions, and the entire ideological underpinnings of what we have to learn in every single discipline.