Top 100 Black Life Quotes
#1. Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks' distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation's history?
Philip Dray
#2. Lynching's legacy, though, is also evident today in law enforcement's freedom from accountability in the shooting of black and other youth of color, thus displaying a de facto, and often actual, legalization of white supremacist killing of black life.
Mark Lewis Taylor
#3. Bob Marley performed the 'One Love Peace' concert in Jamaica with the two different warring political sides. There's always been that in black music and culture in general. It's no surprise because black music is such a reflection of what's going on in black life. It's not unusual for hip-hop.
Mos Def
#4. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#5. There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.
August Wilson
#6. The criminalization of Black life was something specific to the United States in the post-Reconstruction period and there's something like it happening today with mass incarceration, directed largely against black males.
Noam Chomsky
#7. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#8. In the Shadow of Slavery covers two and a half centuries of black life in New York City, and skillfully interweaves the categories of race and class as they affected the formation of African American identity. Leslie Harris has made a major contribution to our understanding of the black experience.
Eric Foner
#9. I don't trust white critics' judgment about most things that deal with black life, particularly when a black person is the creator.
Terry McMillan
#10. This fantasy about the disposability of black life is a constant in American history.
Teju Cole
#11. Black life is ambiguous, and a kaleidoscope of meanings, rich, multi-sided ... we have frozen our vision in figures that caricature, at best the complexity of our lives and leave the real artistic chore of interpretation unfinished.
Charles Bartlett Johnson
#13. Somehow, the Good Lord don't want to see no man start a cold morning with just black coffee.
Robert Newton Peck
#14. Black Humor (Umor): a sensation --of the theatrical (and joyless) pointlessness of everything.
Jacques Vache
#15. Life is full of surprises" she said softly."It's hardly ever black and white.
Brenda Joyce
#16. Abortion is black genocide ... What happens to the mind of a person and the moral fabric of a nation that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience?
Jesse Jackson
#17. Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.
Virginia Woolf
#18. Whiteness is the color of death, you know, not black. Wetness is life, the breeder and shaper of life. In the beginning the sun was black. So all light was absorbed before it had a chance to return. And our dreams, then, were empty.
Jim Carroll
#19. I feel like Black Jesus got his hands on me and guides me through life to put me where I'm supposed to be.
Tupac Shakur
#20. If my body is a Universe, I have a black hole. I mask it, but it sits at the center of my body. I question it. Am I living up to my potential? Would I lose my creativity if I got help? Isn't life a black hole?
Claudia Turner
#21. If you have used colour throughout most of your artistic life, try just black and white ... it will take your painting to another dimension where tone and form in all its permutations reign supreme.
David Luiz
#22. Life was hard. Life was good. Most folks think this a contradiction, but I have learned that the hardest, most difficult times of my life caused the most growth in my character.
Chuck Black
#23. The truth is spectrum, kiddo.
It ain't black or white.
It's more than grey.
Toba Beta
#24. Love actually is a great act of the will. It's when I say, "I desire your good, not for my sake but for yours". To love is to break out of the black hole of the ego and say, "My life is about you".
Bishop Robert Barron
#25. I saw a play in a black box theatre, and it changed my life.
Geneva Carr
#26. I am a little thing, a tiny little thing on the vast prairies. I know nothing. My mouth is dirty. I cannot tell what I want. My feet are sunk in the black swampy land, but I am a lover. I love life. In the end love shall save me.
Sherwood Anderson
#27. Life's not black-and-white. Sometimes the ends justifies the means.
Emily Giffin
#28. ...I'm trying to tell ya something bout my life,,maybe give me insight between black and white,,and the best thing you'd ever done for me is to help me take my life less seriously--it's only LIFE afterall...
Indigo Girls
#29. I will say it one last time: Demonation! The feeling of it! There are no words -how can there be?- to describe what it feels like to become words, to feel your life encoded, and laid out in black ink on white paper. All my love and hatred, melted into words. It was like the End of the World.
Clive Barker
#30. Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.
Charles Frahman
#31. On that night he made clear to his secret society that the fundamental conflict of his life was founded on precisely that belief: the white establishment would always keep the common black man down in order to cover their own asses.
Jeff Hobbs
#32. Hope abides; therefore I abide.
Countless frustrations have not cowed me.
I am still alive, vibrant with life.
The black cloud will disappear,
The morning sun will appear once again
In all its supernal glory.
Sri Chinmoy
#33. When michael jackson died i wonder if his life flashed before him and if it did, i wonder if he thought 'who's that little black kid singing my songs?!'
Sean Lock
#34. Most of life seems to be finding that line between one extreme and another and walking it. This is called judgement. Too many folk try to avoid it by claiming every issue is black or white.
Michael Laird
#35. I think that what we need to do is say, 'Reading is going to really affect your life.' You take a black man who doesn't have a job, but you say to him, 'Look, you can make a difference in your child's life, just by reading to him for 30 minutes a day.' That's what I would like to do.
Walter Dean Myers
#36. Regardless of how black the page, he had always managed to turn it and move on to a new chapter in his life.
Robert Masello
#37. How much easier life would be if people were all black or all white and how much simpler it would be to act in regard to them!
W. Somerset Maugham
#38. I just bring a black turtleneck sweater everywhere - it's the greatest purchase of my life. Period.
Nora Ephron
#39. I like everything about you, honey. Everything. Lived in black and white seems like all my life. Never noticed. Not until you colored my world
Kristen Ashley
#40. I guess the hardest thing is having so much love for you and it somehow not being returned. I develop crushes all the time, but that is just misdirected need for you. You are a hole in my life, a black hole. Anything I place there cannot be returned.
Timothy Conigrave
#41. Another Black Label motto. That's what I think life is. It's just another bridge to cross. You ask no questions. Whatever work it is you gotta do, you gotta go over it, under it, through it, around it, to do it.
Zakk Wylde
#42. According to Holly, it's like the bank in It's a Wonderful Life but I don't watch black and white movies because I own a colour television and it's not 1945 so I'll have to take her word on it.
David Thorne
#43. It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing.
Stephen Greenblatt
#44. Kennedy: You mean it's not a matter of good deeds versus bad deeds, a kind of moral bookkeeping? Lewis: No indeed. Look at the thief on the cross. He made it to paradise even though his life's red ink certainly outweighed the black. Kennedy:
Peter Kreeft
#45. Now hold on, little girl, my father said. Chess is like real life. The white pieces go first so they got an advantage over the black pieces.
Rion Amilcar Scott
#46. Life was not always so peaceful and rewarding at NAPA (the office). Sometime during 1968, I cam back to the office and found the plate glass window shattered. I asked Ab what happened, and he strangely knew nothing.
Junius Williams
#47. Life is not all black or white, there are shades of grey as well. It is this grey shade which provides maximum opportunities and multiple interpretations.
Mayank S. Sengar
#48. You've never told me about your love life, Scarlett. You're a very pretty girl. You must have a boy shacked up somewhere for your personal delights. I'd bet it's a booky one, overtones of Harry Potter and a lot of black T-shirts.
Maureen Johnson
#49. Aflame in black ecstasy, orders extinguished:
after death
how will I know my love was true,
this sacrifice not an exercise in vanity?
Phan Ming Yen
#50. I lifted my Bible in one hand and with my other scooped up all the papers on my adoption. Both hands held paper that contained words printed in black and white ink. Both contained facts. Yet only one held the truth. I had to choose which of these documents I would entrust with my life.
Christine Caine
#51. Colour disturbs people. I am confident in black, not in light. This dark side of life is attractive to me forever and from the beginning. I am a lazy designer when it comes to colour.
Yohji Yamamoto
#52. A life filled with excuses is defeated, unproductive, and miserable.
Stephanie Lahart
#53. I opine-I think you're a woman of your world,' he said from the far end of the couch. 'I would have a hard time seeing you pressed and powdered, dreading a life of servitude under the name of marriage. You'd die in that mold. I like you as you are, fiery and ill tempered.
Kim Harrison
#54. Prejudice is not a symptom of stupidity. Nor is it a symptom of evil. It is merely a symptom of ignorance.
The Prophet Of Life
#55. It didn't take long to realize I didn't hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a woman or a bush it don't mean nothing if you don't ast why you here, period
Alice Walker
#56. She had eyes that bore deep into his heart, bringing a sweet warm wave of assurance within; eyes that cradled him in the crisp black-and-white world on the other side of the picture, where life was, at least, beautifully lit.
Stephen Mosley
#57. Cube's album Death Certificate: "Let me live my life, if we can no longer live our life, then let us give our life for the liberation and salvation of the black nation.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#58. Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery's full grip on U.S. Society - its intimate connections to present day wealth and power, the depth of its injury to black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end - can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life.
Douglas A. Blackmon
#59. There was a photograph of Trout. He was an old man with a full black beard. He looked like a frightened, aging Jesus, whose sentence to crucifixion had been commuted to imprisonment for life.
Kurt Vonnegut
#60. Rejoice, child, the Demon Lord will return for you. He will survive for you; win for you. You are what binds him to life, for he has something the Black Lord does not, the most powerful force of all. Love.
T.C. Southwell
#61. Most of life is grey, with a little tiny bit of black and white. We're always subject to what I call the compression industry, which is an attempt to compress a million shades of grey with a little bit of black and white to just a hundred, or to ten, or to one!
Bill Henson
#62. For the life of him, he couldn't figure why these East Enders called themselves black. He kept looking and looking, and the colors he found were gingersnap and light fudge and dark fudge and acorn and butter rum and cinnamon and burnt orange. But never licorice, which, to him, was real black.
Jerry Spinelli
#63. You write the way you think about the world. My motto in times of trouble - and I'm speaking of life, not writing - is 'no humor too black.'
Elizabeth McCracken
#64. In the beginning - not now, thank God - Patty was always sharing the important books of her life with him, like Black Elk Speaks, The Golden Bough, and Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Richard Price
#65. When you are on stage, you don't see faces. The lights are in your eyes and you see just this black void out in front of you. And yet you know there is life out there, and you have to get your message across.
Suzanne Farrell
#66. Like many people who dress in black, the lump of coal was interested in becoming an artist.
Lemony Snicket
#67. Life is a continuum; neither black nor white, but a series of shades from light to dark. When the shadow is in front of you, all you see is the darkness and forget the sun is at your back.
Brownell Landrum
#68. Here's to life in-the-black. May we wish it on our enemies. - Caleb
Pippa DaCosta
#69. Welcome to the real world, she said to me.
Condescendingly.
Take a seat.
Take your life.
Plot it out in black and white.
John Mayer
#70. The child's face is close to her own now, but there is still no detail. It is a blur, a watercolor painting left out in the rain, the shades running, blending into one another. Only the eyes remain clear; black and hungry, jealous of life.
John Connolly
#73. Black culture has been a huge influence in my life.
Eddie Huang
#74. Every day of my life I walk with the idea that I am black, no matter how successful I am. And our success is tempered by that; you're successful in this way given the fact you are black, and most blacks don't get to that point.
Danny Glover
#75. Time takes life away
and gives us memory, gold with flame,
black with embers.
Adam Zagajewski
#76. Alternately in our lives come black and white.
Nothing is visible through the silent dark hole:
no light, no life, no meandering respite
in the tunnel of death, journeys the eternal soul.
Taranum
#77. I've been a fascinated observer of grand public funerals since I was a kid, starting with the life-altering black-and-white images of President John F. Kennedy's funeral.
David Horsey
#78. There's always the question of what is good and evil and the gray area in between where that most people live. In everyday life, things aren't black or white, but rather there's a lot of coping and really tough decision making.
Laura San Giacomo
#79. I have never been afraid to go a bit out there with what I am wearing on film. I tend to be a bit more conservative in real life, with mountains of black in my closet.
Jane Badler
#80. I opened my veins. Unstoppably life spurts out with no remedy. Now I set out bowls and plates. Every bowl will be shallow. Every plate will be small. And overflowing their rims, into the black earth, to nourish the rushes unstoppably without cure, gushes poetry ...
Marina Tsvetaeva
#81. Shiroyama's heart stops. The earth's pulse beats against his ear.
An inch away is a go clamshell stone, perfect and smooth ...
... a black butterfly lands on the white stone, and unfolds its wings.
David Mitchell
#82. I don't think paper will go away. I do believe that the value of paper will change, and Xerox is working on changing that value. Consider a color page. Actual life is in color, but you keep reproducing it in black and white. You remove value. It's a bad thing to do.
Ursula Burns
#83. Losses do that. One life-loss can infect the whole of a life. Like a rash that wears through our days, our sight becomes peppered with black voids. Now everywhere we look, we only see all that isn't: holes, lack, deficiency.
Ann Voskamp
#84. In black neighborhoods, everybody appreciated comedy about real life. In the white community, fantasy was funnier. I started looking for the jokes that were equally hilarious across the board, for totally different reasons.
Will Smith
#85. In my own life, when I'm not working, I do wear a lot of black. I think I do feel very comfortable in black.
Gugu Mbatha-Raw
#86. Life is in color, but black and white is more realistic.
Samuel Fuller
#87. La vida es un libro en blanco y negro y nosotros salimos a llenar unas hojas"
Life is a book in white and black and we have to go out and to fill the pages
Herman Zapp
#88. The world turned into a big black hole while my daughter was on the verge of life and death.
Ziauddin Yousafzai
#90. Life is much more complex than the black-and-white sound bites that you get on television. There are nuances and shades of gray.
Joe Berlinger
#91. On our life map, he drew a bright circle around twelve through eighteen. This was the abyss where, unguided, black boys were swallowed whole, only to reemerge on corners and prison tiers.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#92. Southern California, which is shaped somewhat like a coffin, is a giant sanatorium with flowers where people come to be cured of life itself in whatever way .... This is the last stop before the sun gives up and sinks into the black, black ocean, and night - usually starless here - comes down.
John Rechy
#93. Black Consciousness is an attitude of the mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time.
Steven Biko
#94. I've liked different women at different times in my life. I've been attracted to white women. I've been attracted to black women. I've been attracted to Asian women. I've been attracted to various subspecies of women. I can say with gratitude that I've been able to experiment.
Oliver Stone
#95. In my whole life, I've worn black tie three times. I can't tie the knot myself.
Stefano Gabbana
#96. To me, most of life kind of lives in the grey and I don't just mean morally. I just mean kind of everything. If things were black and white it would be a lot clearer as to what to do all the time.
Sarah Paulson
#97. When I was a kid, I knew the black and white version of 'Jane Eyre,' and I guess I became interested in the idea of romantic love - of unrequited love and the tragedies of that; of what are the important things in life; what should one value over other materials.
Cary Fukunaga
#98. There's no way to explain to a child that the line between good and evil isn't nearly as black and white as a fairy tale would leave you to believe. That an ordinary person can turn into a villain, under the right circumstances. That sometimes we dragon slayers do things we aren't proud of.
Jodi Picoult
#99. That's how the universe worked at times: little things - the tiniest things - could catapult you toward a good life, but you had to be open and you had to be paying attention. Love wasn't purely destined, it relied on hiccups of fate - Aimee Mann, someone else's trip to Peru, a black dog.
Davy Rothbart
#100. Life without music can only be seen in black and white. It takes music to add the color.
Jessie Haas
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