Lorraine Hansberry Quotes

I think that the glorious thing about the human race is that it does change the world
constantly. The world or 'life' may seem to more often overwhelm the human being's capacity for struggling against being overwhelmed which is remarkable and exhilarating.

The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.

I'm just tired of hearing about God all the time. What has He got to do with anything? ... I'm not going to be immoral or commit crimes because I don't believe. I don't even think about that. I just get so tired of Him getting the credit for things the human race achieves through its own effort. Now, there simply is no God. There's only man. And it's he who makes miracles.

Do you really think the rape of a continent dissolves in cigarette smoke?

The grim possibility is that she who 'hides her brains' will, more than likely, end up with a mate who is only equal to a woman with 'hidden brains' or none at all.

American straightforwardness is almost as disarming as Americans invariably think it is.

When a man knows that the abstraction ten exists - nothing on earth can stop him from looking for the fact of eleven.

Of love and my parents, there is little to be written; their relationship to their children was utilitarian. We were fed and housed and dressed and outfitted with more cash than our associates and that was all. We were also vaguely taught certain vague absolutes: that we were better than no one but infinitely superior to everyone...

Beneatha: You didn't tell us what Alaiyo means ... for all I know, you might be calling me Little Idiot or something ...
...
Asagai: It means ... it means One for Whom Bread
Food
Is Not Enough.

[T]here is only one large circle that we march in, around and around, each of us with our own little picture
in front of us
our own little mirage that we think is the future.

Write if you will: but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be - if there is to be a world. Write about all the things that men have written about since the beginning of writing and talking - but write to a point. Work hard at it, care about it. Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don't pass it up. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don't pass it up. Use it. Good luck to you. The Nation needs your gifts.
Lorraine Hansberry speech, "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black," given to Readers Digest/United Negro College Fund creative writing contest winners, NYC, May 1, 1964.

Cause sometimes it's hard to let the future begin!

Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When he's done good and made things easy for everybody? That ain't the time at all. It's when he's at his lowest ... ... and he can't believe in himself because the world's whipped him so!

Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.

Ball points belong to their age. They make everyone write alike.

I think that the human race does command its own destiny and that that destiny can eventually embrace the stars.

Take away the violence and who will hear the men of peace?

I will go home and much of what I will have to say will seem strange to the people of my village... But I will teach and work and things will happen, slowly and swiftly. At times it will seem that nothing changes at all... and then again... the sudden dramatic events which make history leap into the future. And then quiet again. Retrogression even. Guns, murder, revolution. And I even will have moments when I wonder if the quiet was not better than all that death and hatred. But I will look about my village at the illiteracy and disease and ignorance and will not wonder long. And perhaps... perhaps I will be a great man... I mean perhaps I will hold on to the substance of truth and find my way always with the right course... and perhaps for it I will be butchered in my bed some night by the servants of empire...

...perhaps the things I believe now for my country will be wrong and outmoded, and I will not understand and do terrible things to have things my way or merely to keep my power. Don't you see that there will be young men and women, not British soldiers then, but my own black countrymen... to step out of the shadows some evening and slit my then useless throat? Don't you see they have always been there... that they always will be. And that such a thing as my own death will be an advance? They who might kill me even... actually replenish me!

In my mother's house there is still God."
Act 1, Scene 1 ~ A Raisin in the Sun

Then isn't this rather all a false funeral? Can't it help you to see that there is something wrong when all the dreams in this house-good or bad-had to depend on something that might never have happened if a man had not died? We always say at home: Accident was at the first and will be at the last a poor tree from which the fruits of life may bloom.

Beneatha: Love him? There is nothing left to love.
Mama: There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing. (Looking at her) Have you cried for that boy today? I don't mean for yourself and for the family 'cause we lost the money. I mean for him: what he been through and what it done to him. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain't through learning - because that ain't the time at all. It's when he's at his lowest and can't believe in hisself 'cause the world done whipped him so! when you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.

You aimin' to go the full circle now? How long before I have to come get you up from the sidewalks? You got hurt and pain in you? Well, I used to know a man who knew how to live with his pain and make his hurt work for him. Your daddy died with dignity; there wasn't no bum in him. And he known some hurts in this life you ain't never even heard of!

Perhaps I will be a great man ... I mean perhaps I will hold on to the substance of truth and find my way always with the right course

It's dangerous, son."
"What's dangerous?"
"When a man goes outside his house to look for peace.

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A status not freely chosen or entered into by an individual or a group is necessarily one of oppression and the oppressed are by their nature (i.e., oppressed) forever in ferment and agitation against their condition and what they understand to be their oppressors. If not by overt rebellion or revolution, then in the thousand and one ways they will devise with and without consciousness to alter their condition

There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing.

Seems like God don't see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams - but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile.

Something always told me I wasn't no rich white woman.

That's what being eccentric means
being natural.

Our Southside is a place apart: each piece of our living is a protest.

There may be women to emerge who will be able to formulate a new and possible concept that homosexual persecution and condemnation has at its roots not only social ignorance, but a philosophically active anti-feminist dogma.

I care. I care about it all. It takes too much energy NOT to care ... the WHY of why we are here is an intrigue for adolescents; the HOW is what must command the living. Which is why I have lately become an insurgent again.

I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from truthful identity of what is.

I wish to live beacause life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough and
I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations and generations.

I know he's rich. He knows he's rich, too.

I look at you and I see the final triumph of stupidity in the world!

It isn't a circle
it is simply a long line
as in geometry, you know, one that reaches into infinity. And because we cannot see the end
we also cannot see how it changes. And it is very odd by those who see the changes
who dream, who will not give up
are called idealists ... and those who see only the circle we call them the "realists"!

For if there are no waving flags and marching songs at the barricades as Walter marches out with his little battalion, it is not because the battle lacks nobility. On the contrary, he has picked up in his way, still imperfect and wobbly in his small view of human destiny, what I believe Arthur Miller once called "the golden threat of history." He becomes, in spite of those who are too intrigued with despair and hatred of man to see it, King Oedipus refusing to tear out his eyes, but attacking the Oracle instead. He is that last Jewish patriot manning his rifle at Warsaw; he is that young girl who swam into sharks to save a friend a few weeks ago; he is Anne Frank, still believing in people; he is the nine small heroes of Little Rock; he is Michelangelo creating David and Beethoven bursting forth with the Ninth Symphony. He is all those things because he has finally reached out in his tiny moment and caught that sweet essence which is human dignity, and it shines like the old star-touched dream that it is in his eyes.

A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness, as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men - and people in general.

Obviously the most oppressed of any oppressed group will be its women

What you ain't never understood is that I ain't got nothing, don't own nothing, ain't never really wanted nothing that wasn't for you. There ain't nothing as precious to me ... There ain't nothing worth holding on to, money, dreams, nothing else

You're a nice-looking girl ... all over. That's all you need, honey, forget the atmosphere.