Ntozake Shange Quotes

#1. I found god in myself and i loved her i loved her fiercely - Author: Ntozake Shange

#2. I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else. - Author: Ntozake Shange

#3. In our ordinaryness we are most bizarre. - Author: Ntozake Shange

#4. I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager ... and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that. - Author: Ntozake Shange

#5. My spirit is too ancient to understand the separation of soul & gender - Author: Ntozake Shange

#6. I usedta live in the world
really be in the world
free & sweet talkin
good mornin & thank-you & nice day
uh huh
i cant now
i cant be nice to nobody
nice is such a rip-off
regular beauty & a smile in the street
is just a set-up - Author: Ntozake Shange

#7. Being alive and being a woman is all I got, but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't conquered yet. - Author: Ntozake Shange

#8. What I want and I wanted to be unforgettable. - Author: Ntozake Shange

#9. When I die, I will no be guilty of having left a generation of girls behind thinking that anyone can tend to their emotional health other than themselves. - Author: Ntozake Shange

#10. Multiculturalism isn't about culture, it's about power. - Author: Ntozake Shange

#11. Creation is everything you do. Make something. - Author: Ntozake Shange

#12. Ever since I realized there waz someone callt/
a colored girl an evil woman a bitch or a nag/
i been tryin not to be that & leave bitterness/
in somebody else's cup ... - Author: Ntozake Shange

#13. White people use their literature to maintain culture. That's why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels. - Author: Ntozake Shange

#14. And this is for Colored girls who have considered suicide, but are moving to the ends of their own rainbows. - Author: Ntozake Shange

#15. If anything is life-changing, being the descendant of a slave is. - Author: Ntozake Shange

#16. I am gonna write poems til i die and when i have gotten outta this body i am gonna hang round in the wind and knock over everybody who got their feet on the ground. - Author: Ntozake Shange

#17. I done forgot all abt words
aint got no definitions - Author: Ntozake Shange

#18. I'm only human, & inadequacy is what makes us human, & if we was perfect we wdnt have nothin to strive for, so you might as well go on & forgive me pretty baby, cause i'm sorry - Author: Ntozake Shange

#19. I've never thought of leaving the South, never. - Author: Ntozake Shange

#20. Our dreams draw blood from old sores. - Author: Ntozake Shange

#21. I'm a firm believer that language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives and other people's lives. - Author: Ntozake Shange

#22. Multiculturalism is a white people joke. - Author: Ntozake Shange

#23. The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness. - Author: Ntozake Shange

#24. I got 15 trumpets where other women got hips
& a upright bass for both sides of my heart - Author: Ntozake Shange

#25. Right now being born a girl is to be born threatened ... - Author: Ntozake Shange

#26. Where there is a woman there is magic. - Author: Ntozake Shange

#27. Through my tears
I found god in myself
and I loved her fiercely - Author: Ntozake Shange

#28. Our society allows people to be absolutely neurotic and totally out of touch with their feelings and everyone else's feelings, and yet be very respectable. - Author: Ntozake Shange

#29. When words & manners leave you no space for yourself
make
very personal
very clear
& your obstructions will join you or disappear. - Author: Ntozake Shange

#30. Nice is such a rip-off. - Author: Ntozake Shange

#31. I write for young girls of color, for girls who don't even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive. I can only change how they live, not how they think. - Author: Ntozake Shange