Toni Cade Bambara Quotes

Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well? ... Just so's you're sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you're well.

People have to be given permission to write, and they have to be given space to breathe and stumble. They have to be given time to develop and to reveal what they can do.

... got to give it all up, the pain, the hurt, the anger and make room for lovely things to rush in and fill you full.

For people sometimes believed that it was safer to live with complaints,
was necessary to cooperate with grief, was all right to become an accomplice in self-ambush ...
Take heart to flat out decide to be well and stride into the future sane and whole.

Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion.

Reappraise the past, re-evaluate where we've been, clarify where we are, and predict or anticipate where we are headed ...

In a capitalist society a man is expected to be an aggressive, uncompromising, factual, lusty, intelligent provider of goods,and the woman, a retiring, gracious, emotional, intuitive, attractive consumer of goods.

If your house ain't in order, you ain't in order. It is so much easier to be out there than in here.

Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.

The story is a piece of work. The novel is a way of life.

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 to extract meaning from it, to bring meaning to it.

All writers, musicians, artists, choreographers/dancers, etc., work with the stuff of their experiences. It's the translation of it, the conversion of it, the shaping of it that makes for the drama.

And what is religion, you might ask. It's a technology of living.

My responsibility to myself, my neighbors, my family and the human family is to try to tell the truth.

I'll be damned if I want most folks out there to do unto me what they do unto themselves.

Medication without explanation is obscene.

Write a lot and hit the streets. A writer who doesn't keep up with what's out there ain't gonna be out there.

We have not been scuffling in this waste-howling wildness for the right to be stupid.

There are times ... when any visitor - in person, by phone, by mail - is an intruder, a burglar, a space hogger, an oxygen taker, a chaos maker, a conflict inducer, a mood chaser, and a total drag.

Take away the miseries and you take away some folks' reason for living.

What can defeat greed, technological superiority, and legal lawlessness ... is discipline, consciousness, and unity.