African American Novel Quotes

You carry the weight of the preternatural world on those big shoulders of yours. But your heart is even bigger, and the burden you harbor there heavier. ~ N.D. Jones

She was turned on by him - his scent, his smile; he was the manifestation of seduction. Under normal circumstances, she'd be tempted, but might have had enough willpower to resist him. These weren't normal circumstances, however. Tonight, she was certain she wanted him in her bedroom. ~ Norian F. Love

What the Nazis did to the Jews in Europe, plantation owners and law enforcement [officers] were doing to the African-Americans. ~ Morris Dees

Do you understand the meaning of the soil beneath your feet? ~ P.J. Parker

The abolition of slavery, apart from preservation of the Union, was the most important result of our Civil War. But the transition was badly handled. Slaves were simply declared free and then left to their own devises. Southern Negroes, powerless, continued to be underprivileged in education, medical care, job opportunities and political status. ~ William Silverman

On Slavery: The saddest slap in the face is we have NO monument, no real statues or memorials, no special day of Atonement or Remembrance (NOT ONE), no thanks for 400+ years of free labor, forced servitude across the Trans-Atlantic, ass beatings, buying ourselves and families out of slavery, rape and plunder ... but everyone else has monuments, special museums, and even movies. This is what America thinks of black people, so-called black president and all, who has been largely silent on this subject ... we'll even celebrate Leprechauns, Easter Bunnies, and Secretary's Day before we acknowledge our history. ~ Brandi L. Bates

In the great city of San Francisco, where I used to live, at 2 in the morning every other Victorian house has somebody who is writing the great American novel. And the city is not loaded with James Joyces or Virginia Woolfs. But entrepreneurship is about distorted views of reality. ~ Tom Peters

I always believed there would be an African-American president. It was something I'd dreamed about, thought about, but certainly did not believe would happen in my lifetime. ~ Edward Brooke

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

There was something wonderful about a blank sheet of notepaper. The lines were there, just waiting to be filled, and the page could turn into anything from a grocery list to the opening of The Great American Novel. The possibilities were endless. ~ Joanne Fluke

The contemporary memoir is playing an important role in at least just bringing certain relationships out into the open in American society, and also it's a place where the novel of development, the novel of consciousness, has gone. ~ Marco Roth

Passion without purpose is like a shot without a target. ~ Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Epictetus has had a long-standing resonance in the United States; his uncompromising moral rigour chimed in well with Protestant Christian beliefs and the ethical individualism that has been a persistent vein in American culture. His admirers ranged from John Harvard and Thomas Jefferson in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth. More recently, Vice-Admiral James Stockdale wrote movingly of how his study of Epictetus at Stanford University enabled him to survive the psychological pressure of prolonged torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973. Stockdale's story formed the basis for a light-hearted treatment of the moral power of Stoicism in Tom Wolfe's novel A Man in Full (1998).52 ~ Epictetus

One of two historically African American communities that sprang up along the Mississippi Gulf Coast after emancipation, North Gulfport has always been a place where residents have had fewer civic resources than those extended to other outlying communities. ~ Natasha Trethewey

It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,
this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost ... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American ... ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

The white economic and political elite often failed to recognize blacks as American, just as blacks often failed to recognize their potential for advancement outside of the limited opportunities afforded them by whites. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

I do think that it's a responsibility when there are so few of us as African Americans to kind of get to that place of success in a positive light. We should take a stance and stand for something and use that platform for positivity. ~ Misty Copeland

She said I was a monster, and for a long time I believed her. But you made me feel like a man, someone worthy of being loved. Then you went away, and I had nothing, nothing but a
hopeless demon inside. ~ N.D. Jones

Over the past two generations, 48 percent of all African American families have lived in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods in each generation. The most common experience for black families since the 1970s, by a wide margin, has been to live in the poorest American neighborhoods over consecutive generations. Only 7 percent of white families have experienced similar poverty in their neighborhood environments for consecutive generations. By contrast, persistent neighborhood advantage is virtually nonexistent for black families. One out of every one hundred black families in the United States has lived in affluent neighborhoods over the past two generations, compared to roughly one out of five white families. ~ Patrick Sharkey

I think a lot of African-American kids don't have fathers to teach them how to dress, so you end up being taught by pictures in magazine and movies. You see cowboys, Indians, old Hollywood films, Cary Grant. It has an effect on you. ~ Andre Benjamin

My father passed away a few days before my election. This man, an African American born to a poor single mother in 1936 in the South, would worry in the last years of his life that he had better life chances when he was growing up than a young man born in the same circumstances would have today. ~ Cory Booker

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me. ~ Ralph Ellison

African American music can't happen in Germany or in Italy or in Mumbai. If America disappeared off the face of the Earth today, the greatest single cultural loss would be blues, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, rock-and-roll. ~ David Simon

Your wealth can be stolen, but the precious riches buried deep in your soul cannot. ~ Minnie Riperton

The United Nations and the Organization of American States have named 2011 as the International Year for People of African Descent. This is an opportunity for all of us around the globe to celebrate the diversity of our societies and to honor the contributions that our fellow citizens of African descent make every day to the economic, social and political fabrics of our communities. ~ Hillary Clinton

I come from an interracial family: My father is from Nigeria, and so he is African-American, and my mother is American and white, so I rarely see skin color. It's never an issue for me. ~ Annie Ilonzeh

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law. ~ James Baldwin

In the Shadow of Slavery covers two and a half centuries of black life in New York City, and skillfully interweaves the categories of race and class as they affected the formation of African American identity. Leslie Harris has made a major contribution to our understanding of the black experience. ~ Eric Foner

'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing way of American life, and to my own particular child - and girlhood in upstate New York. Everyone in the novel is enormously close to me, including Marianne's cat, Muffin, who was in fact my own cat. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

But then it came time for me to make my journey - into America. [ ... N]o coincidence that my first novel is called Americana. That became my subject, the subject that shaped my work. When I get a French translation of one of my books that says 'translated from the American', I think, 'Yes, that's exactly right. ~ Don DeLillo

That so many of them were African American, many of them my grandmother's age, struck me as simply a part of the natural order of things: growing up in Hampton, the face of science was brown like mine. My ~ Margot Lee Shetterly

Boris Pasternak wrote in his novel "Doctor Zhivago," 'I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.' As much as we may deplore who we were, without looking backwards and learning from our mistakes we would never become who we wish to become. Marilynne Robinson, an American novelist and essayist said, 'I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was finally answered.' Perhaps we should not calibrate our degree of remorse for events that did not turn out as planned, and instead take measurement of our soul by asking ourselves if we lived courageously, loved fearlessly, exhibited fierce loyalty, and were kind and generous to the young, the old, and the infirm. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Dealing with pain for surviving on this thirsty concrete ~ Kjiva

I am a Black woman... Exquisite from the inside out. ~ Stephanie Lahart

You gotta understand, my great-grandfather was German and Irish. My grandmother was Indian, and my grandfather was African-American, so we all got a little something in us. ~ Tracy Morgan

My father was a frustrated writer. I think he wanted to write the great American novel. ~ Anne Waldman

If you come to me and say, 'Hey look I'm a racist,' or 'I discriminate against blacks,' or 'I don't like you because you're African American,' I respect that. I can respect you more by doing that. But don't smile in my face, shake my hand, and then you don't really respect me, or want me to be around, or come to your games as the owner of the Clippers. ~ Magic Johnson

The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free. ~ Zadie Smith

I love "Phenomenal Woman." The experiences she had of being African American in the U.S. - that itself is a task. I appreciate the hardships Maya Angelou went through for our generation. I'm super influenced by the black people that paved the way for us. ~ Serena Williams

Rainbow Cloud strode forward like a hunting cat with the same strength of height and broad shoulders, the same rolling gait as First Light's father. They were indeed the same man, split in two at birth, so the family might be rewarded by twice the skill in hunting each brother possessed. ~ P.J. Parker

For poetry and I are one
To separate is to decapitate
For my poetry is forever. ~ Kerry D. Brackett

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. ~ Audre Lorde

If it were in our national security to deploy to South Africa under apartheid, would we have found it acceptable or customary to segregate African American soldiers from other American soldiers, and say, 'It's just a cultural thing'? I don't think so. I would hope not. ~ Martha McSally

I'm African American, I'm a lot of other things, a musician and an artist. But that woman part holds the most pain for me. And therefore, obviously, the most lessons. ~ India.Arie

We can't all work in the inner city. And, I don't even think that it is incumbent upon an African-American intellectual to be concerned in their work with problems of race and class. It's just one of the things, that we here at the DuBois Institute, are concerned about. ~ Henry Louis Gates