Black Diaspora Quotes

And watching this silently, as was my way, I marveled at the bonds between us-the way we shortened our words, or spoke, sometimes, with no words at all...an entire world of our own, hidden away from them, and to be part of that world, I felt even then, was to be in on a secret, a secret that was in you. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Steve and I caught Neil Young promoting his first solo album, his signature black Gibson plugged into a tiny Fender amp, blowing out the walls of the Bitter End. ~ Bruce Springsteen

copies were passed to the cryptanalysts, who sat in little kiosks, ready to tease out the meanings of the messages. As well as supplying the emperors of Austria with invaluable intelligence, the Viennese Black Chamber sold the information it harvested to other powers in Europe. In 1774 an ~ Simon Singh

Timeless
Days without rhythm
Without bottom or top
In the arms of my lover
Time seems to stop.
Days become months
Which flow into years
Love's hourglass measures
Just two kinds of tears.
The first kind is cheery,
It sweetens the cheek;
The other burns bleary
It's black and it's bleak.

This Sunday or Friday,
I'm not quite sure when,
I'm going to turn thirty,
Or twenty, or ten?
It'll be my love's birthday
Or was it just mine?
I doesn't much matter
There's plenty of wine.
Should she go to heaven,
I dread to know when,
I'll count every second
Till we meet again. ~ Beryl Dov

Evan Lucien, if it is my last act upon this Earth," he says, his eyes intense and shadowed in the lantern light, "I will make you come. ~ Lilly Black

What would you think of an engineer who expounded the art of flying without revealing the secrets of the engine and propeller? That's what you do, you engineer of the human soul. Just that. You're a coward. You want the raisins out of my cake but you don't want the thorns of my roses. Haven't you too, little psychiatrist, been cracking silly jokes about me? Haven't you ridiculed me as "the prophet of bigger and better orgasms"? Have you never heard the whimpering of a young wife whose body has been desecrated by an impotent husband? Or the anguished cry of an adolescent bursting with unfulfilled love? Does your security still mean more to you than your patient? How long will you go on valuing your respectability above your medical mission? How long will you refuse to see that your pussyfooting procrastination is costing millions their lives? ~ Wilhelm Reich

I played with the Birmingham Black Barons. I was making 500 at 14. That was a lot of money in those days. ~ Willie Mays

Let me be serious: divorce is a sacred institution between a man and a woman who hate each other. God wanted Adam to pay alimony to Eve, not Steve. ~ Lewis Black

And she understood now that love wasn't just wanting, but a steady devotion, no matter what. ~ Shayla Black

New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party - usually at a gathering in a home - where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite literally establishes caste along color lines within black life. ~ Michael Eric Dyson

But every line we write breathes victory and challenge, the bad temper of a conqueror, underground explosions, howls. We are a volcano. We vomit forth black smoke.
The heavens open and out comes an imposing
Pile of garbage; it looks a lot like Leo Tolstoy ~ Velimir Khlebnikov

Sir Galahad and Sir Percivale rencountered in the depths of a great forest. Now, Sir Galahad was dight all in harness of silver, clear and shining; the which is a delight to look upon, but full hasty to tarnish, and withouten the labour of a ready squire, uneath to be kept fair and clean. And yet withouten squire or page, Sir Galahad's armour shone like the moon. And he rode a great white mare, whose bases and other housings were black, but all besprent with fair lilys of silver sheen. ~ George MacDonald

From behind a wooden crate we saw a long black-muzzled nose poking round at us. We took him out-soft, wobbly, tearful; set him down on his four, as yet not quite simultaneous legs, and regarded him. He wandered a little round our legs, neither wagging his tail nor licking at our hands; then he looked up, and my companion said: "He's an angel!" ~ John Galsworthy

Just because I am bitter about romance doesn't mean everyone else needs to be. ~ Holly Black

Just because it's the pot calling the kettle black, doesn't make the claim any less legitimate. ~ SonnyGoten

Dead calm, then a murmur, a name, a murmured name, in doubt, in fear, in love, in fear, in doubt, wind of winter in the black boughs, cold calm sea whitening whispering to the shore, stealing, hastening, swelling, passing, dying, from naught come, to naught gone ~ Samuel Beckett

Camped somewhere deep in an impenetrable crag of the immense Powder River Country during the late autumn of 1856, more than likely in the shadow of the sacred Black Hills, one imagines the thirty-five-year-old Red Cloud stepping from his tepee to listen to the bugle of a bull elk in its seasonal rut. Around him women haul water from a crystalline stream as cottonwood smoke rises from scores of cook fires and coils toward a sky the color of brushed aluminum. The wind sighs, and a smile creases his face as he observes a pack of mounted teenagers collect wagers in preparation for the Moccasin Game, or perhaps a rough round of Shinny. His gaze follows the grace and dexterity of one boy in particular, a slender sixteen-year-old with lupine eyes. The boy is Crazy Horse, and the war leader of the Bad Faces makes a mental not to keep tabs on this one. ~ Bob Drury

She has never messed up a single take yet. Recently I was in a scene and there was a table covered with a cloth. When the director said cut, I saw a black nose and two paws inching out from under the cloth. She had hidden there without making a sound until we were done with the scene. She wanted to be nearer to me. ~ Jack Lemmon

I am concerned that in their efforts to evade the Sapphire stereotype, black women may be discouraged from demanding equal consideration of their specific political needs within black political discourses. ~ Melissa V. Harris-Perry

However, the daily life of the slaves in the South, as observed by many travelers, was obscured for all time by the relentless promotion of a single book, Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Even today, any black who dares to say that perhaps we are not as badly off as our brethren in the jungles of Africa is hooted down as an "Uncle Tom." [ ... ] It was no accident that Harriet Beecher Stowe's book became the greatest best seller of its time - it was tirelessly promoted throughout the entire nation, in the most successful book promotion campaign in our history. ~ Eustace Mullins

The pools had been written onto the fields by the rain. The pools were a magic worked by the rain, just as the tumbling of the black birds against the grey was a spell that the sky was working and the motion of grey-brown grasses was a spell that the wind made. Everything had meaning. ~ Susanna Clarke

At that moment he didn't like mankind, the grown-ups, the adults. He never liked them when it was dark. At such times it was his habit to think mankind away. Then the world would seem like a dark, empty house, and he felt a shudder inside himself, as if now he had to search through room after room - dark rooms where you didn't know what was hidden in the corners - feeling his way across the thresholds where no foot would tread any more apart from his, until in one room the doors in front of and behind him would suddenly close and he would be facing the mistress of the black hordes herself. And at that moment all the locks of all the other doors he had come through would shut, and far beyond the walls the shadows of the darkness would stand watch, like black eunuchs, keeping out all human contact. ~ Robert Musil

Mistaking a naive observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Each of them had been looking for a way out of their own black midnights, and each of them still had a long way to go until they found some kind of dawn. ~ Ari Berk

The boy looks into Mugwump eyes blank as obsidian mirrors, pools of black blood, glory holes in a toilet wall closing on the Last Erection. ~ William S. Burroughs

At least ten times as many people died from preventable, poverty-related diseases on September 11, 2011, as died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that black day. The terrorist attacks led to trillions of dollars being spent on the 'war on terrorism' and on security measures that have inconvenienced every air traveller since then. The deaths caused by poverty were ignored. So whereas very few people have died from terrorism since September 11, 2001, approximately 30,000 people died from poverty-related causes on September 12, 2001, and on every day between then and now, and will die tomorrow. Even when we consider larger events like the Asian tsunami of 2004, which killed approximately 230,000 people, or the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that killed up to 200,000, we are still talking about numbers that represent just one week's toll for preventable, poverty-related deaths - and that happens fifty-two weeks in every year. ~ Peter Singer

The people ... " Winter whispered. "Are going to die," the man said, watching coldly. "It's a shame; I didn't mean for it to get quite that out of control. I let my anger get away from me. I had intended to scorch the ground around us, leave you in the middle of a smoking crater, but when people interfere with me, when they try to shake me down, take what's mine, it makes me ... so angry." Winter watched the scorched ground as the black smoke started to rise. The man shook him, diverting Winter's attention back to him. "Listen to me. ~ Robert J. Crane

Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out. ~ John Updike

You can never have too many black pumps. Never! ~ Andre Leon Talley

It is - their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. [...] Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans. The conquering of the planets. Something frenzied and demented, as was their conquering of Africa, and before that, Europe and Asia. Their view; it is cosmic. Not of a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honorable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And they - these madmen - respond to the granite, the dust, the longing of the inanimate; they want to aid Natur. […] They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. ~ Philip K. Dick

The fading dawn colors revive momentarily, and the sky shines with lilac and daffodil, layering colors in clouds like quilts stacked on a bed. More birds chime into the morning air: a nuthatch's nasal onk joins the crow's croak and a black-throated green warbler's murmur from the branches above the mandala. As the colors finally fade under the fierce gaze of their mother, the sun, a wood thrush caps the dawn chorus with his astounding song. The song seems to pierce through from another world, carrying with it clarity and ease, purifying me for a few moments with its grace. Then the song is gone, the veil closes, and I am left with embers of memory. ~ David George Haskell

What shall I do, singer and first-born, in a
world where the deepest black is grey,
and inspiration is kept in a thermos?
with all this immensity
in a measured world? ~ Marina Tsvetaeva

When you're white, the sky's the limit. When you're black, the limit's the sky. ~ Chris Rock

The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.
The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic admiration. ~ Maya Angelou

I'm pretty sure decapitation wouldn't get us out of patrol."
I smiled, which earned me a glare from Finley. "I know it must be an adjustment after having faeries, or whatever, do your dirty work for you, but this is how we do things here," she said, shoving a black backpack at me.
"Please. You must never have met a faerie if you think they do anything dirty," I replied.
"We've met plenty of faeries," Finley snapped, but her shoulders were up around her ears, and Izzy shot her a curious look. Whatever. I had enough family drama of my own to deal with. But then I reminded myself that technically, Izzy and Finley were my family. Demons on one side, Prodigium on the other. Was it any wonder I was so screwed up?
Finley turned to face the door, which was bolted with several different locks. I watched her spin the dial on two, open another with a key she wore around her neck, ad unhook a latch at the top.
"Man, I bet it takes you forever to get into your lockers," I joked. ~ Rachel Hawkins

Afro-Caribbean influences are in me as a creative being the same way Spanish influences were in Picasso's work. I think the notion of labels - "black dancer, black choreographer" -is a ploy to divide and conquer, and to limit. ~ Garth Fagan

There's never really been a time when vampires weren't so over that you would be crazy to write a vampire book, or so huge that you would be crazy to write a vampire book. I'm not sure there's ever going to be a time. We went from Anne Rice to Buffy to 'Twilight.' ~ Holly Black

There had always been black people in and out of our house, and from the outset I had been taught that for them life was defined by struggle and filled with injustice. ~ Carl Bernstein

A film fable so structured that all alchemical searchings are clearly filmwise (gold being discovered cinematically in each sequence ot mixed black-and-white and color) so that when the drama-discovery is actually made, it acts as a deliberate anti-climax of aesthetic perfection. ~ Stan Brakhage

It's no surprise that at the same time that American universities have engaged in a serious commitment to diversity, they have been thought-prisons. We are not talking about diversity in any real way. We are talking about brown, black, white versions of the same political ideology. ~ Richard Rodriguez

You gave me books and articles. You keep telling me not to forget I'm Arab. But it's not just the white people reminding me who I am, Baba. Arabs remind me I'm not one of them too. This world may never let me forget I am Arab, but it will also keep me from belonging as one of them. ~ Aminah Mae Safi

I waited, Rachel. I waited until you were old enough. I wasted my time looking for girls who came even remotely close to looking like you." His hand brushed through my hair as he studied it. "Long legs. Long, straight, near-black hair. Eyes the exact color of sapphires." A heavy sigh left him and his forehead creased. "But none of them were you. None of them had your temper; none of them had your fire for life. So none of them deserved to have your beauty." "Like Jenn." I realized it with dread and watched his face twist with a look of disgust. "Everything I've done up until this point has been for you and our future together. I only wish," he said against my lips, "that you would stop being so goddamn difficult. ~ Molly McAdams

The French translation of 'a black hole has no hair' is so obscene that French publishers resisted it vigorously, to no avail. ~ Kip S. Thorne