EyeWrite > EyeWrite's Quotes

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Impossibilities are merely things of which we have not learned, or which we do not wish to happen.”
― Charles W. Chesnutt

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”
― James Baldwin

“The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.”
― James Baldwin

“When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.”
― James Baldwin

“One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“The job of the artist is not to resolve or beautify, but to hold complexities, to see and make clear.”
― Toi Derricotte

“It is not just the language that we are sharing, it is what we don’t say. We are calling each other out of loneliness, across space, out of recognition of our beauty and power, and we are willing to go past the destruction and hurt we have done to reach each other.”
― Toi Derricotte, The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey

“You might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.”
― Lucille Clifton, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.”
― Toni Morrison, The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993

“Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.”
― Toni Morrison

“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.”
― Toni Morrison

“In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”
― Toni Morrison

“You are your best thing”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?”
― Toni Morrison

“The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
― Toni Morrison

“There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.”
― Toni Morrison

“A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double.”
― Toni Morrison

“Lonely was much better than alone.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”
― James Baldwin

“You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.”
― James Baldwin

“It is quite impossible to write a worth-while novel about a Jew or a Gentile or a Homosexual, for people refuse, unhappily, to function in so neat and one-dimensional a fashion.”
― James Baldwin, A Dialogue