Bambara Quotes

#1. She wanted me to remember that pleasure is political
for the capacity to relax and play renews the spirit and makes it possible for us to come to the work of writing clearer, ready for the journey. (bell hooks about Toni Cade Bambara)

Bell Hooks

#2. 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.

Toni Cade Bambara

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

Toni Cade Bambara

#4. 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.

Toni Cade Bambara

#5. 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.

Toni Cade Bambara

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

Toni Cade Bambara

#7. Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.

Toni Cade Bambara

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

Toni Cade Bambara

#9. We have not been scuffling in this waste-howling wildness for the right to be stupid.

Toni Cade Bambara

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

Toni Cade Bambara

#11. Medication without explanation is obscene.

Toni Cade Bambara

#12. Not all speed is movement.

Toni Cade Bambara

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

Toni Cade Bambara

#14. 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.

Toni Cade Bambara

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

Toni Cade Bambara

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

Toni Cade Bambara

#17. My mother, religious-negro, proud of having waded through a storm, is, very obviously a sturdy bridge that I have crossed over on.

Toni Cade Bambara

#18. 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.

Toni Cade Bambara

#19. The purpose of a writer is to make revolution irresistible.

Toni Cade Bambara

#20. 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.

Toni Cade Bambara

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

Toni Cade Bambara

#22. 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.

Toni Cade Bambara

#23. 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?

Toni Cade Bambara

#24. 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.

Toni Cade Bambara

#25. 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.

Toni Cade Bambara

#26. Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well? ... Just so's you're sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you're well.

Toni Cade Bambara

#27. An artist represents an oppressed people and makes revolution irresistible.

Toni Cade Bambara

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

Toni Cade Bambara

#29. ... got to give it all up, the pain, the hurt, the anger and make room for lovely things to rush in and fill you full.

Toni Cade Bambara

#30. For people sometimes believed that it was safer to live with complaints,
was necessary to cooperate with grief, was all right to become an accomplice in self-ambush ...
Take heart to flat out decide to be well and stride into the future sane and whole.

Toni Cade Bambara

#31. Old folks are the nation.

Toni Cade Bambara

#32. Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion.

Toni Cade Bambara

#33. The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible

Toni Cade Bambara

#34. Old folks is the nation.

Toni Cade Bambara

#35. 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.

Toni Cade Bambara

#36. I'll be damned if I want most folks out there to do unto me what they do unto themselves.

Toni Cade Bambara

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

Toni Cade Bambara

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

Toni Cade Bambara

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

Toni Cade Bambara

#40. Revolution begins with the self, in the self.

Toni Cade Bambara