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 »
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 »
TV's exploration of the game of consumption and sociability is, by the nature of the medium, on a far more subtle level than anyth...ing ever done by the movies. It can dramatize and expose and suggest ways of transcending social banality that are impossible to the screen, largely because of the very "actuality" and "interview" format of TV that at the same time produces so much of its rubbish. It is terrible but true that TV has probably elevated ten times as many family conversations in Sourwater, Georgia, as it has degraded there.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 »
The most condensed format of the conversionist motif is the TV commercial, which has become essential to both network and religiou...s broadcasting. Embedded in its structure are sentiments from our religious and political heritage: salvation and choice. Newness of life can now be associated with a change of heart about politics, the purchase of a new car, or the selection of a beverage. A Pepsi commercial, for example, designed to fit the charismatic personality and gifts of singer Michael Jackson, became an invitation to make a decision and join in. Images and sounds of the soft-drink ad drew viewers into a growing throng of happy, dancing people following the steps of a dynamic cultural hero. Even couch potatoes might have been roused, vicariously at least, to skip lightly behind the agile Jackson as he led his ecstatic followers to the right choice. The conversionist call in this instance is to come on up to the good life through Pepsi. Nonetheless it plays upon the persuasive motifs of turning around and becoming a part of something larger.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 »
The purpose of adolescence is to revise the past, not to obliterate it. . . . Adolescence entails the deployment of family passion...s to the passions and ideals that bind individuals to new family units, to their communities, to the species, to nature, to the cosmos. Therefore, given half a chance, the revolution at issue in adolescence becomes a revolution of transformation, not of annihilation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »