Top 91 Toussaint Quotes
#1. As for Toussaint, she venerated Jean Valjean and liked everything he did. One
Victor Hugo
#2. There would be no Rock and Roll without Ike Turner, James Brown, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, etc. Fake ghetto books and fake ghetto music. Elvis Presley, whom they idol, is merely a karaoke makeover of James Brown and Chuck Berry.
Ishmael Reed
#3. He's a seminal force, a guru, an original creator of the New Orleans piano style.. the teacher of great players like Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, Mac Rebenack, James Booker, and Huey Smith. All acknowledge him as The Great Master.
Jerry Wexler
#4. We went to labor in the fields, my wife and I, hand in hand. Scarcely were we conscious of the fatigues of the day. Heaven always blessed our toil.
Toussaint Louverture
#5. I invite you, citizens, to open your eyes and to give serious attention to the future. Reflect on the disasters which may ensue from longer obstinacy. Submit to lawful authority, if you wish to preserve the South untouched. Save your families and your property.
Toussaint Louverture
#6. I have need of Rigaud. He is violent. I want him for carrying on war; and that war is necessary to me.
Toussaint Louverture
#7. I never planned on being a live performer. My whole forte was about being in the studio, producing, playing the piano on recording sessions. I was all about the studio.
Allen Toussaint
#8. As an early child, I tried to play every kind of music that I heard. I thought everyone was doing that.
Allen Toussaint
#9. I have published a proclamation: 'Forgive us our transgressions as we forgive those who transgress against us.' I have ordered all citizens to return to their parishes to enjoy the benefits of this general amnesty.
Toussaint Louverture
#10. Initially I started in theatre as a Shakespearean actress before film and television. I've always been an artistic child growing up and I knew I wanted to act for as long as I can remember.
Lorraine Toussaint
#11. We are free today because we are the stronger; we will be slaves again when the government becomes the stronger.
Toussaint Louverture
#12. I keep waiting for someone to cast me as the angel or the witch or the immortal of some kind because so much of the reading I do for my own pleasure is fantasy, horror, or sci-fi.
Lorraine Toussaint
#13. I don't think anyone would disagree with this: You are self-directed in daytime, and that's it. So come with it, and bring it on the first take.
Lorraine Toussaint
#14. I find I often do my best work when I'm not attached to the outcome of the audition.
Lorraine Toussaint
#15. The ordinary is ultimately what moves us most deeply. It's what touches us, and it's what we most recognize, in great moments of art.
Lorraine Toussaint
#17. For the painful essence of withdrawal does not reside in the present suffering it brings - withdrawal is painless on the level of the immediate moment - but in the prospect of suffering to come, the rich future that one can imagine one's torture enjoying.
Jean-Philippe Toussaint
#18. As a young child, I thought that all pianists played everything. I mean, I thought anything on piano - any piano music, all pianists played it.
Allen Toussaint
#19. I've sort of prided myself on playing characters with conscience. The first way I go about creating a character is looking at that area of conscience. What have they done, and what has it cost.
Lorraine Toussaint
#20. The Spanish offered me their protection, and liberty to those who would fight for the cause of the kings. I accepted their offers, seeing myself entirely abandoned by my brethren, the French.
Toussaint Louverture
#21. We actors are superstitious creatures. We do all the homework, and we put all of the components together, but there's always one key aspect that we're not in charge of, really, and that's magic. You are always on the lookout for where and how that magic is going to ignite.
Lorraine Toussaint
#22. This gun is liberty; hold for certain that the day when you no more have it, you will be returned to slavery.
Toussaint Louverture
#23. Being a mom myself and it being a huge and important part of who I am, made it easier for me to play the role of a strong, fierce, giving mom.
Lorraine Toussaint
#24. When you eliminate vanity from an art form, and I would think that this would be any art form, what is left is an opportunity to be incredibly naked and truthful.
Lorraine Toussaint
#26. To travel and to get around different places, especially in station wagons, you could really see America.
Allen Toussaint
#27. Whatever defamation of character my enemies are spreading about me, I do not feel the need to justify myself toward them. While discretion obliges me to remain silent, my duty compels me to prevent them from doing any more harm.
Toussaint Louverture
#28. I hope that whenever my daughter has a negative experience, I'm there to talk about it and remind her how we feel when it's done to her so that she doesn't do it to others.
Lorraine Toussaint
#29. General Biassou is a simple, vulnerable man without much knowledge, and he is easily led astray by the scoundrels surrounding him. He has sworn eternal hatred for me, and for some time now, he has been trying to destroy me using whatever means he can.
Toussaint Louverture
#31. So many young people feel powerless. We live in a world where it feels like it's so big and yet so small, and that your contribution really doesn't matter.
Lorraine Toussaint
#32. As an actor, I usually have to find something to love about my character in order to play her.
Lorraine Toussaint
#33. I grew up under the British system, which I think is horrific for children - very, very strict - a system that did not recognize children as being individuals. You were small animals earning the right to be human.
Lorraine Toussaint
#35. I have taken my flight in the region of eagles; when I alight, it must be on a rock, and that rock must be a constitutional government, of which I shall be the head so long as I shall be among men.
Toussaint Louverture
#36. I grew up a middle class, colonized child of teachers and librarians and people, women especially, who treasured education.
Lorraine Toussaint
#37. I think if I weren't an actress, I might have made a halfway decent attorney! I like the way they think.
Lorraine Toussaint
#38. It is not a liberty of circumstance, conceded to us alone, that we wish; it is the adoption absolute of the principle that no man, born red, black or white, can be the property of his fellow man.
Toussaint Louverture
#39. I am kind; I am humane. I open to you my fatherly arms. Come, all of you; I will receive you all - no less those of the South than those of the West, and of the North, who, gained over by Rigaud, have deserted your firesides, your wives, your children, to place yourselves at his side.
Toussaint Louverture
#40. The heads of regiments are required to see that the troops join in prayer morning and evening as far as the service will permit.
Toussaint Louverture
#41. I know what it was like to not have a voice, so my daughter has a voice. I veto that voice when needed because at the end of the day I am the grown-up, but I hear her.
Lorraine Toussaint
#42. And you hate me. "For something I didn't do and something you didn't see. Hate
Carlyle Toussaint
#43. The mother-in-laws themselves weren't natural jokes but most comedians used to use that.
Allen Toussaint
#44. God, who knows our most secret thoughts and who sees all, is witness to the purity of my principles. They are not founded on this barbarous ferocity that takes pleasure in shedding human blood.
Toussaint Louverture
#45. At the beginning of the troubles of Saint Domingo, I felt that I was destined to great things. When I received this divine intimation, I was four and fifty years of age; I could neither read nor write.
Toussaint Louverture
#46. Once I'm on set, the only thing I'm really interested in is being in the room. Being present. And trusting that what I've done is sufficient, and I'm also trusting that I've also left room for magic.
Lorraine Toussaint
#47. 'Body of Proof' was interesting because ... I didn't feel I needed to prove anything in that audition. I didn't over-prepare it, but I was just very relaxed in it.
Lorraine Toussaint
#48. The revolution of Saint Domingo was taking its course. I saw that the whites could not endure, because they were divided and because they were overpowered by numbers; I congratulated myself that I was a black man.
Toussaint Louverture
#49. My music is homegrown from the garden of New Orleans. Music is everything to me short of breathing. Music also has a role to lift you up - not to be escapist but to take you out of misery.
Allen Toussaint
#50. The income of the world's 500 richest people exceeds the cumulative income of the world's 416 million poorest people. - UNITED NATIONS DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM
Eric Toussaint
#51. if he knew how upset I was for opening my big fat mouth. "I'm sorry about what happened in there. I shouldn't have told Mama about Joseph Theodore Page being on Ted's birth certificate, but she
Maggie Toussaint
#52. We all have a dark side. Most of us go through life avoiding direct confrontation with that aspect of ourselves, which I call the shadow self. There's a reason why. It carries a great deal of energy.
Lorraine Toussaint
#53. I accept everything which is favorable for the people and the army; for myself, I wish to live in retirement.
Toussaint Louverture
#56. And do respect the women of the world; remember you all had mothers.
Allen Toussaint
#57. I have undertaken vengeance. I want Liberty and Equality to reign in Saint-Domingue. I work to bring them into existence. Unite yourselves to us, brothers, and fight with us for the same cause.
Toussaint Louverture
#58. As a modern woman, there are things I take for granted, and that shows up in the way I sit, the way I walk, the way I think, and what I know to be possible.
Lorraine Toussaint
#59. You can't play history and you can't play historical characters. You just have to reduce it to the ordinary.
Lorraine Toussaint
#60. They have in me struck down but the trunk of the tree; the roots are many and deep - they will shoot up again!
Toussaint Louverture
#62. A lot of our young people are sleep-walking, dreaming that they're awake, and lots of aspects of society initially go about keeping it so.
Lorraine Toussaint
#63. I have read every book in the 'Dune' series and every Anne Rice book.
Lorraine Toussaint
#64. I have a big life, a small child, I work, I do a lot of things, so I'm often playing catch-up with what's current.
Lorraine Toussaint
#65. To play with a band all of the time, just about nightly, was good for me because I wrote lots of arrangements and I got a lot of my transposition and chords ironed out.
Allen Toussaint
#67. My job as an actor is to cover and expose in varying allowance that - so that the audience can peek through the window to the people I create.
Lorraine Toussaint
#68. How well I walk my talk, and not talk my talk, determines the quality of my engagement, of all my experience with what is quite personally my God. I'm my greatest teacher, and within me, I have the power to push myself deeper and higher.
Lorraine Toussaint
#69. Sometimes the character will go into a completely different direction than I expected once the cameras start rolling. That's what I love about what I do.
Lorraine Toussaint
#70. I meditate. I've been a meditator since, I think I was doing it unofficially before all my life and then began to formalize it somewhere around 14.
Lorraine Toussaint
#71. I am faithfully devoted to the Republic but will not serve it at the expense of my conscience and my honor.
Toussaint Louverture
#73. When stepping into the mind of a psychopath, you realize that there is something missing in their brain that they do not understand the consequences of their actions- in a sense.
Lorraine Toussaint
#74. The light and the dark are the same. They share. They really do rub up against each other, and they are extraordinarily familiar with each other. They are actually friends.
Lorraine Toussaint
#75. I took up arms for the freedom of my color. It is our own - we will defend it or perish.
Toussaint Louverture
#76. I love to see how a character unfolds off the page in a project. I don't always know how the character is going to turn out, even with the script being there. It's not always clear where that character is going to take me. Or where I will take them.
Lorraine Toussaint
#77. I've become very fond of the law. I've always been an advocate for justice, which occasionally the law brings to light.
Lorraine Toussaint
#78. The whites have resolved to destroy our liberty and have therefore brought a force commensurate to their intentions. The Cape, after a proper resistance, has fallen into their hands, but the enemy found only a town and plain in ashes; the forts were blown up, and all was burnt.
Toussaint Louverture
#79. I was born odd. I was a strange child. My grandmother was always praying over me. She was always rubbing me and praying over me.
Lorraine Toussaint
#80. People's faith, people's beliefs are such a personal thing, and it defies definition. I'm so rarely interested in discussing what I believe or what you believe. I think it's liquid, anyway.
Lorraine Toussaint
#81. For where books, for instance, always offer a thousand times more than they are, television offers exactly what it is, its essential immediacy, its ever-evolving, always-in-progress superficiality.
Jean-Philippe Toussaint
#82. When you're playing live, those people who you're trying to please and reach, they're right there giving you feedback. And you don't get that feedback in the studio.
Allen Toussaint
#83. I know how to move the people, but I know also where to stop in my own actions so that, when I strike, I shall be felt and not seen.
Toussaint Louverture
#84. I love characters that are very layered and complex. It's more exciting and different than any simple role- plus, I love a good challenge.
Lorraine Toussaint
#85. Mastered by deadly passions, Rigaud has dug a gulf at your feet; he has laid snares which you could not avoid. He wished to have you as partisans in his revolt; and to succeed in his object, he has employed falsehood and seduction.
Toussaint Louverture
#87. The chances of seeing an idea through to completion are inversely proportional to the time you've spent talking about it beforehand.
Jean-Philippe Toussaint
#88. To get to New Orleans you don't pass through anywhere else. That geographical location, being aloof, lets it hold onto the ritual of its own pace more than other places that have to keep up with the progress.
Allen Toussaint
#89. When you're playing a real character, you want to honor that person and receive inspiration from that person. They need to anoint you in some way that allows you to borrow just a small piece of their soul. That is the flame.
Lorraine Toussaint
#90. Whenever I wrote songs - particularly back then - it would always be for a particular artist.
Allen Toussaint
#91. It is easy to cut down the tree of liberty, but not so easy to restore it to life.
Toussaint Louverture
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