Top 32 Ntozake Shange Quotes
#1. Authors I've longed to write like - but realize I actually can't even begin to - include Poe, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kafka, Daniil Kharms, Witold Gombrowicz, Emily Dickinson, Robert Walser, Barbara Comyns, Ntozake Shange, Camille Laurens, Zbigniew Herbert, and Jose Saramago.
Helen Oyeyemi
#2. I got 15 trumpets where other women got hips
& a upright bass for both sides of my heart
Ntozake Shange
#4. 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
Ntozake Shange
#7. 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.
Ntozake Shange
#9. The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.
Ntozake Shange
#10. 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.
Ntozake Shange
#11. Right now being born a girl is to be born threatened ...
Ntozake Shange
#13. Through my tears
I found god in myself
and I loved her fiercely
Ntozake Shange
#14. 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.
Ntozake Shange
#15. When words & manners leave you no space for yourself
make
very personal
very clear
& your obstructions will join you or disappear.
Ntozake Shange
#17. 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.
Ntozake Shange
#18. If anything is life-changing, being the descendant of a slave is.
Ntozake Shange
#19. And this is for Colored girls who have considered suicide, but are moving to the ends of their own rainbows.
Ntozake Shange
#20. 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.
Ntozake Shange
#21. 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 ...
Ntozake Shange
#23. Multiculturalism isn't about culture, it's about power.
Ntozake Shange
#24. 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.
Ntozake Shange
#26. Being alive and being a woman is all I got, but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't conquered yet.
Ntozake Shange
#27. 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
Ntozake Shange
#28. My spirit is too ancient to understand the separation of soul & gender
Ntozake Shange
#29. 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.
Ntozake Shange
#31. 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.
Ntozake Shange
#32. I found god in myself and i loved her i loved her fiercely
Ntozake Shange
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