When we dream about those who are long since forgotten or dead, it is a sign that we have undergone a radical transformation and t...hat the ground on which we live has been completely dug up: then the dead rise up, and our antiquity becomes modernity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I do not think that literature is the primary instrument for social transformation, but I do think it has potency. So I work to te...ll the truth about people's lives; I work to celebrate struggle, to applaud the tradition of struggle in our community, to bring to center stage all those characters, just ordinary folks on the block, who've been waiting in the wings, characters we thought we had to ignore because they weren't pimp-flashy or hustler-slick or because they didn't fit easily into previously acceptable modes or stock types. I want to lift up some usable truths ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 t...o extract meaning from it, to bring meaning to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although a firm swat could bring a recalcitrant child swiftly into line, the changes were usually external, lasting only as long a...s the swatter remained in view....Permanent transformation had to be internal....The habits of self discipline, as laborious and frustrating as they were to achieve, offered the only real possibility of keeping children safe from their own excesses as well as the omnipresent dangers of society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At no previous period has mankind been faced by a half-century which so paradoxically united violence and progress. Its greater an...d lesser wars and long series of major assassinations have been strangely combined with the liberation of more societies and individuals than ever before in history, and by the transformation of millions of second-class citizens--women, workers and the members of subject races--to a stage at which first-rate achievement is no longer inhibited even if opportunities are not yet complete.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!--it seems to say,--there is victory yet for all justice; and ...the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Music, theoretically considered, consists altogether of lines of tone. It more nearly resembles a picture or an architectural draw...ing, than any other art creation; the difference being that in a drawing the lines are visible and constant, while in music they are audible and in motion. The separate tones are the points through which the lines are drawn; and the impression which is intended, and which is apprehended by the intelligent listener, is not that of single tones, but of continuous lines of tones, describing movements, curves and angles, rising, falling, poising--directly analogous to the linear impressions conveyed by a picture or drawing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brain... that is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious--to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great et...ernal forms of life and transformation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Usually, when people talk about the "strength" of black women they are referring to the way in which they perceive black women cop...ing with oppression. They ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »