My Ishmael Quotes

#1. I grew up as a Muslim. I went to an Islamic elementary school. Most of my community was Muslim, so I grew up praying five times a day.

Ishmael Beah

#2. I wanted to see my family, even if it meant dying with them.

Ishmael Beah

#3. I would try desperately to think about my childhood, but I couldn't. The war memories had formed a barrier that I had to break in order to think

Ishmael Beah

#4. I get a chance to observe the moon now, I still see those same images I saw when I was six, and it pleases me to know that that part of my childhood is still embedded in me.

Ishmael Beah

#5. My generation of writers has been prone to premature illness and death, especially the women. When Black male writers meet it's like a session of the American Diabetic Association.

Ishmael Reed

#6. What happens in the context of war is that, in order for you to make a child into a killer, you destroy everything that they know, which is what happened to me and my town. My family was killed, all of my family, so I had nothing.

Ishmael Beah

#7. I was so happy that my mother, father, and two brothers had somehow found one another. Perhaps my mother and father have gotten back together, I thought.

Ishmael Beah

#8. My novels and poems are meant to be read aloud. That's why jazz musicians have been able to adapt my stuff.

Ishmael Reed

#9. I had gone to a talent show - I was interested in American hip-hop music - with my older brother, to another town, and my town was attacked. I went from having an entire family to the next minute not having anything. It was very painful.

Ishmael Beah

#10. I have Black guys who tell me they put my books on their bed stands to read at night like something for guidance or information. That really pleases me a lot. I think my work has changed some things. It's changed me.

Ishmael Reed

#11. My work holds up the mirror to hypocrisy, which puts me in a tradition of American writing that reaches back to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Ishmael Reed

#12. Sometimes I closed my eyes hard to avoid thinking, but the eye of the mind refused to be closed and continued to plague me with images.

Ishmael Beah

#13. Regardless of the criticisms I receive from the left, the right and the middle, I think it's important to maintain a prolific writing jab, as long as my literary legs hold up.

Ishmael Reed

#14. Call me Ishmael. I won't answer to it, because it's not my name.

Jenny Lawson

#15. ONE OF THE UNSETTLING THINGS about my journey, mentally, physically, and emotionally, was that I wasn't sure when or where it was going to end.

Ishmael Beah

#16. I knew I could never forget my past, but I wanted to stop talking about it so that I would be fully present in my new life.

Ishmael Beah

#17. We not only grew up on Be-Bop; Be-Bop raised us. For my generation, Be-Bop came on like a light bulb going flash behind the eyes.For us, it was not only an intellectual movement, but a way of life. We walked, dressed, and rapped Be-Bop.

Ishmael Reed

#18. My childhood had gone by without my knowing, and it seemed as if my heart had frozen.

Ishmael Beah

#19. I put my hands behind my head and lay on my back, trying to hold on to the memories of my family. Their faces seemed to be far off somewhere in my mind, and to get to them I had to bring up painful memories.

Ishmael Beah

#20. My squad was my family, my gun was my provider and protector, and my rule was to kill or be killed.

Ishmael Beah

#21. For generations comedians have made jokes about Scots-Irish in the South inter-breeding. "I am my own grandpa" and all that stuff; you know, because they all were marrying their first cousins.

Ishmael Reed

#22. My teeth became sour as I listened to his story. It was then that I understood why he was quiet all the time.

Ishmael Beah

#23. I think I have a pugnacious style. My style is not pretty. I don't use words like "amber" or "opaque."

Ishmael Reed

#24. These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past. (page 20)

Ishmael Beah

#25. I joined the army to avenge the deaths of my family and to survive, but I've come to learn that if I am going to take revenge, in that process I will kill another person whose family will want revenge; then revenge and revenge and revenge will never come to an end ...

Ishmael Beah

#26. In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.

Ishmael Beah

#27. I took out my grenade and put my fingers inside the pin. 'Do you boys want this to be your last meal, or do you want to answer his question?

Ishmael Beah

#28. Shred my beard and call me Ishmael!" the captain shouted. He

Lisa McMann

#29. My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style.

Ishmael Reed

#30. Whenever I speak at the United Nations, UNICEF or elsewhere to raise awareness of the continual and rampant recruitment of children in wars around the world, I come to realize that I still do not fully understand how I could have possibly survived the civil war in my country, Sierra Leone.

Ishmael Beah

#31. In Haitian mythology there is the figure Ghede, who in West Africa, is Iku, whose role is to show "each man his devil." He's represented by a figure wearing a top hat and smoking a cigar. That's my gig.

Ishmael Reed

#32. I get most my information about what's happening in the United States from reports and studies, which are often in conflict with what you read on the editorial pages, or handouts from right wing institutions like the American Enterprise Institute.

Ishmael Reed

#33. My mother tongue, Mende, is very expressive, very figurative, and when I write, I always struggle to find the English equivalent of things that I really want to say in Mende. For example, in Mende, you wouldn't say 'night came suddenly'; you would say 'the sky rolled over and changed its sides.'

Ishmael Beah

#34. When I say Afro-American aesthetic, I'm not just talking about the United States, I'm talking about the Americas. People in the Latin countries read my books because they share the same international aesthetic that I'm into and have been into for a long time. And it's multicultural.

Ishmael Reed

#35. Do you think that Gwendolyn Brooks would give an award to someone who hated Black women, the lie that was circulated throughout New York and reached all the way down to Martinique where I was a guest Professor? The lie was circulated by people who don't read my books.

Ishmael Reed

#36. My squad is my family, my gun is my provider, and protector, and my rule is to kill or be killed.

Ishmael Beah

#37. Putting food under lock and key was one of the great innovations of your culture. No other culture in history has ever put food under lock and key - and putting it there is the cornerstone of your economy.[ ... ] Because if the food wasn't under lock and key, Julie, who would work?

Daniel Quinn

#38. I was sad to leave, but I was also pleased to have met people outside of Sierra Leone. Because if I was to get killed upon my return, I knew that a memory of my existence was alive somewhere in the world.

Ishmael Beah

#39. My conception of New York City came from rap music. I envisioned it as a place where people shot each other on the street and got away with it; no one walked on the streets, rather people drove in their sports cars looking for nightclubs and for violence.

Ishmael Beah

#40. I finally had to go to the American Civil Liberties Union here in northern California to get my reply published to what I considered to be a hatchet job done by Stanley Crouch.

Ishmael Reed

#41. I lay in my bed night after night staring at the ceiling and thinking, Why have I survived the war? Why was I the last person in my immediate family to be alive? I didn't know.

Ishmael Beah