Quotes About Perception

Ah'm uh man even if Ah is de Mayor. But de mayor's wife is somethin' different again.

It was bad enough for white people, but when one of your own color could be so different: it put you in a wonder.

They seemed to be staring at the dark but their eyes were watching God.

The sunlight where I had lost them was still of Midas gold, but that which touched me where I stood had somehow turned to gilt.

For the first time she could see a man's head naked of its skill. Saw the cunning thoughts race in and out through the caves and promontories of him mind long before they darted out of the tunnel of his mouth. She saw he was hurting inside so she let it pass without talking.

Ah hears what they say 'cause they just will collect round mah porch 'cause it's on de big road. Mah husband git so sick of 'em sometime he

I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background. For instance at Barnard. Beside the waters of the Hudson I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.

An envious heart makes a treacherous ear. They done 'heard' 'bout you just what they hope done happened.

As soon as Tea Cake went out pushing wind in front of him, he saw that the wind and water had given life to lots of things that folks think of as dead and given death to so much that had been living things. Water everywhere. Stray fish swimming in the yard. Three

She couldn't make him look just like any other man to her. He looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom—a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God. So

Once, when they used to set their mouths in what they thought was the Boston Crimp, and ask me about the differences between the ordinary Negro and "the better-thinking Negro", I used to show my irritation by saying I did not know who the better-thinking Negro was. I knew who the think-they-are-better Negroes were, but who were the better thinkers was another matter.

Most people is thin-brained.

Many a man thinks he is making something when he's only changing things around.

But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over. In a way she turned her back upon the image

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

The rose of the world was breathing out smell.

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.

You know they say a white man git in some kind of trouble, he'll fret and fret until he kill hisself. A n****r git into trouble, he'll fret for a while, then g'wan to sleep.

Ah jus lak uh chicken. Chicken drink water, but he don't pee-pee.

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.

Man, like all the other animals, fears and is repelled by that which he does not understand, and mere difference is apt to connote something malign. --Essay What White Publishers Won't Print (Negro Digest, April 1950)

The villagers said that John Redding was a queer child.

An envious heart makes a treacherous ear. They have 'heard' 'bout you just what they hope has happened.

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