Toni Cade Bambara Quotes

Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion. I've seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges.

What can defeat greed, technological superiority, and legal lawlessness ... is discipline, consciousness, and unity.

The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.

old folks is the nation.

Revolution begins with the self, in the self.

One monkey don't stop no show. Not one, not six. The struggle continues.

I tend to agree that celibacy for a time is worth considering, for sex is dirty if all it means is winning a man, conquering a woman, beating someone out of something, abusing each other's dignity in order to prove that I am a man, I am a woman.

My responsibility to myself, my neighbors, my family and the human family is to try to tell the truth.

Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.

When you dream, you dialogue with aspects of yourself that normally are not with you in the daytime and you discover that you know a great deal more than you thought you did.

Medication without explanation is obscene.

All writers, musicians, artists, choreographers/dancers, etc., work with the stuff of their experiences. It's the translation of it, the conversion of it, the shaping of it that makes for the drama.

Revolution begins with the self, in the self.... We'd better take the time to fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, revolutionary relationships. Mouth don't win the war.

Take away the miseries and you take away some folks' reason for living.

The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible

When we ever invited the beast to dinner he didn't come in and swipe the napkins and start taking notes on the tablecloth 'bout how to take over the whole house?

An artist represents an oppressed people and makes revolution irresistible.

I try to live [the Golden Rule] and I certainly expect it of some particular others. But I'll be damned if I want most folk out there to do unto me what they do unto themselves.

The story is a piece of work. The novel is a way of life.

Old folks are the nation.

I've never been convinced that experience is linear, circular, or even random. It just is. I try to put it in some kind of order to extract meaning from it, to bring meaning to it.

There are times ... when any visitor - in person, by phone, by mail - is an intruder, a burglar, a space hogger, an oxygen taker, a chaos maker, a conflict inducer, a mood chaser, and a total drag.

The dream is real, my friends. The failure to make it work is the unreality.

... in a capitalist society a man is expected to be an aggressive, uncompromising, factual, lusty, intelligent provider of goods,and the woman, a retiring, gracious, emotional, intuitive, attractive consumer of goods.

Not all speed is movement.

She [my mother] gave me permission to wonder, to dawdle, to daydream.

And what is religion, you might ask. It's a technology of living.

People have to be given permission to write, and they have to be given space to breathe and stumble. They have to be given time to develop and to reveal what they can do.

(M)aybe we too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect . . . you know . . . like being people.

Writing is a legitimate way, an important way, to participate in the empowerment of the community that names me.

Reappraise the past, re-evaluate where we've been, clarify where we are, and predict or anticipate where we are headed. . . .

The only proper mask to wear in life is your own damn face.

Write a lot and hit the streets. A writer who doesn't keep up with what's out there ain't gonna be out there.

It's a dismally lonely business, writing.

Our lives preserved. How it was; and how it be. Passing it along in the relay. That is what I work to do: to produce stories that save our lives.

What is happening to the daughters of the yam? Seem like they just don't know how to draw up the powers from the deep like before. Not full sunned and sweet anymore.

We have not been scuffling in this waste - howling wilderness for the right to be stupid. All this waste.