Paule Marshall Quotes

A silenced Haiti has once again found its literary voice.

Sometimes a person has to go back, really back-to have a sense, an understanding of all that's gone to make them-before they can go forward.

And in a way, this was how he had come to see his death, as a series of small ones taking place over the course of his life and leading finally to the main event, which would be so anti-climatic, so undramatic (a sudden violent seizure in his long abused heart, a quick massive flooding of the brain) it would go unnoticed. It was the small deaths occurring over an entire lifetime that took the greater toll.

Perhaps she was both child and woman, darkness and light, past and present, life and death - all the opposites contained and reconciled in her.

Once a great wrong has been done, it never dies. People speak the words of peace, but their hearts do not forgive. Generations perform ceremonies of reconciliation but there is no end.

We live surrounded by white images, and white in this world is synonymous with the good, light, beauty, success, so that, despite ourselves sometimes, we run after that whiteness and deny our darkness, which has been made into the symbol of all that is evil and inferior.

A country where everybody always running from the next body feeling they's better. But mark my words, one of these days they gon all run out of where-to-run. ~ Ulene

A person can run for years but sooner or later he has to take a stand in the place which, for better or worse, he calls home, and do what he can to change things there.

My very first lessons in the art of telling stories took place in the kitchen ... my mother and three or four of her friends ... told stories ... with effortless art and technique. They were natural-born storytellers in the oral tradition.

I question whether I want to be integrated into America as it stands now, with its complacency and materialism, its soullessness ...