Intelligent Black Woman Quotes

Black, intelligent, and educated... Now that's POWER. ~ Stephanie Lahart

I've often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless. You may be able to pass in mainstream society, appearing acceptable to others, even desired. But in reality you have nowhere to rest, nowhere to feel safe. Even while you're out in public, feeling fine and free, inside you cannot shake the feeling of rootlessness. Others may even envy you, but this masks the fact that at night, there is nowhere safe for you, no place to call your own. ~ Zinzi Clemmons

A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE ....
enough money within her control to move out
and rent a place of her own even if she never wants
to or needs to...
A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE ....
something perfect to wear if the employer or date of her
dreams wants to see her in an hour...
A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE ...
a youth she's content to leave behind....
A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE ....
a past juicy enough that she's looking forward to
retelling it in her old age....
A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE .....
a set of screwdrivers, a cordless drill, and a black
lace bra...
A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE ....
one friend who always makes her laugh... and one who
lets her cry...
A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE ....
a good piece of furniture not previously owned by anyone
else in her family...
A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE ....
eight matching plates, wine glasses with stems, and a
recipe for a meal that will make her guests feel honored...
A WOMAN SHOULD HAVE ....
a feeling of control over her destiny...
EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW...
how to fall in love without losing herself..
EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW...
HOW TO QUIT A JOB,
BREAK UP WITH A LOVER,
AND CONFRONT A FRIEND WITHOUT RUINING THE FRIENDSHIP...
EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW...
when to try harder... and WHEN TO WALK AWAY...
EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW...
that she can't change the length of her calves,
the width of ~ Pamela Redmond Satran

In New York - the New York of her own time, at least - they would have been objects of scorn and anger, the butt of every idiot's crude, cruel jokes: a black woman of twenty-six and her whitebread lover who was three years younger and who had a tendency to talk like dis and dat when he got excited. Her whitebread lover who had been carrying a heavy monkey on his back only eight months before. Here, there was no one to jeer or laugh. Here, no one was pointing a finger. Here, there were only Roland, Eddie, and herself, the world's last three gunslingers. ~ Stephen King

A historian once speculated on what would happen if a time-traveller from 1945 arrived back in Europe just before the First World War, and told an intelligent and well-informed contemporary that within thirty years a European nation would make a systematic attempt to kill all the Jews of Europe and exterminate nearly six million in the process. If the time-traveller invited the contemporary to guess which nation it would be, the chances were that he would have pointed to France, where the Dreyfus affair had recently led to a massive outbreak of virulent popular antisemitism. Or might it be Russia, where the Tsarist 'Black Hundreds' had been massacring large numbers of Jews in the wake if the failed Revolution of 1905. That Germany, with its highly acculturated Jewish community and its comparitive lack of overt or violent political antisemitism, would be the nation to launch this exterminatory campaign would hardly have occurred to him. ~ Richard J. Evans

I was raised by a single black deaf woman, so I am as independent as they come. ~ Grace Gealey

Everything about us black people is complicated, us being here, being a minority, being a woman, all those things are complicated. ~ Nicole Beharie

As a black and as a woman, I didn't think that I would really want to live in any of the eras before this, because I would inevitably be worse off. I would have spent more time struggling just to prove I was human than doing my work. ~ Octavia E. Butler

She shot him a look.

"What?" he asked.

"Where's my journal? I want to jot this down for posterity."

Huh?

He lifted a confused brow and she smirked, ornery light glinting in her amber brow.

"You just spoke, like what? A whole four sentences? Not to mention there were a few adjectives thrown in there. That must be some sort of record. It should be memorialized accordingly, don't you think? She batted her lashed.

Jesus, the woman was too much. ~ Julie Ann Walker

Amidst his chaotic thoughts, Ellis thought of Clairey's face, and he clung to that image. He conjured the radiant glow of her eyes when she was pleased with something, and the small, bashful smile that was fleeting but infinitely more priceless because of its rarity. Clairey's memory was the light that came on the heels of a black and starless night. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever known. It was more than her looks that drew him to this conclusion; it was her kindness, her strength, her spirit. Somehow, the thought of her tethered him to sanity. ~ Tracy Winegar

I also wanted to do something that I hadn't really seen in almost any black novels, which was a complex love story in which both people were extremely intelligent and talented and understood a lot of things and were still at odds getting it together. ~ Stanley Crouch

He walked to the exit, skirting the pools of vapor light purely out of habit, but he saw that the last lamp was unavoidable, because it was set directly above the exit gate. So he saved himself a further perimeter diversion by walking through the next-to-last pool of light, too. At which point a woman stepped out of the shadows. She came toward him with a distinctive burst of energy, two fast paces, eager, like she was pleased to see him. Her body language was all about relief. Then it wasn't. Then it was all about disappointment. She stopped dead, and she said, "Oh." She was Asian. But not petite. Five-nine, maybe, or even five-ten. And built to match. Not a bone in sight. No kind of a willowy waif. She was about forty, Reacher guessed, with black hair worn long, jeans and a T-shirt under a short cotton coat. She had lace-up shoes on her feet. He said, "Good evening, ma'am." She was looking past his shoulder. He said, "I'm the only passenger. ~ Lee Child

My child died last night - and now I shall be alone again, if I must really go on living. They will come tomorrow, strange, hulking, black-clad men bringing a coffin, and they will put him in it, my poor boy, my only child. ~ Stefan Zweig

She is a beautiful, powerful badass woman who sometimes falls apart inside after she drops her bags by the door and tosses her stilettos. Her vulnerability at night helps her to rise stronger in the morning. ~ J. Autherine

Standing in the courtyard with a glass eye; only half the world is intelligible. The stones are wet and mossy and in the crevices are black toads. A big door bars the entrance to the cellar; the steps are slippery and soiled with bat dung. The door bulges and sags, the hinges are falling off, but there is an enameled sign on it, in perfect condition, which says: "Be sure to close the door." Why close the door? I can't make it out. I look again at the sign but it is removed; in it's place there is a pane of colored glass. I take out my artificial eye, spit on it and polish it with my handkerchief. A woman is sitting on a dais above an immense carven desk; she has a snake around her neck. The entire room is lined with books and strange fish swimming in colored globes; there are maps and charts on the wall, maps of Paris before the plague, maps of the antique world, of Knossos and Carthage, of Carthage before and after the salting. In the corner of the room I see an iron bedstead and on it a corpse is lying; the woman gets up wearily, removes the corpse from the bed and absent mindedly throws it out the window. She returns to the huge carven desk, takes a goldfish from the bowl and swallows it. Slowly the room begins to revolve and one by one the continents slide into the sea; only the woman is left, but her body is a mass of geography. I lean out the window and the Eiffle Tower is fizzing champagne; it is built entirely of numbers and shrouded in black lace. The sewers are gurg ~ Henry Miller

the NetMind 'knocked' ... ageless and childish. Today she caught the tumble of roses it threw into her mind in its version of hello, and laughed ... its roses were followed by torrent of images Faith could barely process ... She showed the NetMind a hand, palm-out, their by-now familiar signal for 'slow-down' ... Worried, she sent it an image of a woman colored in darkness ... The image she'd sent was returned to her, but with the DarkMind scrubbed out ... An image of a thousand tears overlaid the snapshot of the PsyNet.
The PsyNet was dying ... She sent the NetMind an image of arms outstretched, an offer of help.
The response was of a globe, but a globe colored in the shades of the Net - white stars against a background of black velvet. Around that globe was a shimmering shield that repelled her hands.
The Net wasn't ready for help.
But there were cracks in the shield. She touched a finger to one crack, and knew that was Judd. The one next to it, Walker. And not far from them, Sascha. So many fine, fine cracks. ~ Nalini Singh

Ed Lim's daughter, Monique, was a junior now, but as she'd grown up, he and his wife had noted with dismay that there were no dolls that looked like her. At ten, Monique had begun poring over a mail-order doll catalog as if it were a book–expensive dolls, with n ames and stories and historical outfits, absurdly detailed and even more absurdly expensive.
'Jenny Cohen has this one,' she'd told them, her finger tracing the outline of a blond doll that did indeed resemble Jenny Cohen: sweet faced with heavy bangs, slightly stocky. 'And they just made a new one with red hair. Her mom's getting it for her sister Sarah for Hannukkah.' Sarah Cohen had flaming red hair, the color of a penny in the summer sun. But there was no doll with black hair, let alone a face that looked anything like Monique's. Ed Lim had gone to four different toy stores searching for a Chinese doll; he would have bought it for his daughter, whatever the price, but no such thing existed.
He'd gone so far as to write to Mattel, asking them if there was a Chinese Barbie doll, and they'd replied that yes, they offered 'Oriental Barbie' and sent him a pamphlet. He had looked at that pamphlet for a long time, at the Barbie's strange mishmash of a costume, all red and gold satin and like nothing he'd ever seen on a Chinese or Japanese or Korean woman, at her waist-length black hair and slanted eyes. I am from Hong Kong, the pamphlet ran. It is in the Orient, or Far East. Throughout the Orient, people shop a ~ Celeste Ng

This Queen right here is educated and beautiful with a degree. ~ Stephanie Lahart

If you are a black woman, you get two history months in a row. ~ Artie Lange

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

I am a black woman, and my experiences would not be what they are if I wasn't. I'm so happy to share those experiences for other people to be able to learn from them. ~ Misty Copeland

My mom is a black-no-sugar woman, but I basically believe in turning my coffee into cheesecake. ~ Jordan Weisman

But a niqab was different. It was not a "choice" in the manner of the consumer economy. A visual obliteration of the self, a plain black niqab was a refusal to engage in everyday modes of self-expression. The woman who wore it chose to wear it because it connected her to something bigger than the self. It could be God. It could be a Muslim identity. But it wasn't a simple case of a teenage fashion choice, that was certain. ~ Carla Power

It is a dangerous time to be a black woman in America. It's a time when we are not safe in the streets or at home or at school or at work and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it. Nobody. Not us. Not our mommas. Not the police. Not the people we elected to look out for our interests. Nobody. We're just out here. (p.53) ~ Pearl Cleage

Still staring at the woman in the mirror, I hung up the phone. She looked as if she was going to cry. I felt bad for her, that woman with the dark hair, the one who only ever wore black and white. The one who might have been pretty if she'd only take care of herself, if only she weren't smarter, if only she didn't earn more money. I felt sorry for her but envied her, too, because she, at least, could cry and I could not. ~ Megan Hart

Hillary Clinton could say she was a woman and running for president. And Sarah Palin could say she was a woman and running for vice-president. But Obama couldn't say, 'I'm black and I'm running for president.' It couldn't come out of his mouth. He couldn't say that because, if he did, he'd lose votes. ~ Paul Mooney

You don't mean to say that Hogan has turned into a woman? Why, yes, that's him all right, you can recognize him by the fact that he has two legs, two arms, and an indecipherable face. Man, woman, what difference does it make? Are they not all exactly the same, these little black insects with their rhythmic movements, the same eyes, the same thoughts? ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Blonde hair and black hair are the two poles of human nature. Black hair signifies virility, courage, frankness, activity, whereas blonde hair symbolises femininity, tenderness, weakness, and passivity. Therefore a blonde is in fact doubly a woman. A princess can only be blonde. That's also why, to be as feminine as possible, women dye their hair yellow- but never black"

"I'm curious about how pigments exercise their influence over the human soul", said Bertlef doubtfully.
"it's not a matter of pigments. A blonde unconsciously adapts herself to her hair. Especially if the blonde is a brunette who dyes her hair yellow. She tries to be faithful to her hair colour and behaves like a fragile creature, a shallow doll, she demands tenderness and service, courtesy and alimony, she's incapable of doing anything for herself, all refinement on the outside and coarseness on the inside. If black hair became a universal fashion, life on this world would clearly be better. It would be the most useful social reform ever achieved. ~ Milan Kundera

When you're writing, you think: How does intimacy happen in the work? You don't know who your reader is, woman, man, child, black person, Asian, who knows? ~ Claudia Rankine

Myron walked up the little brick walk and knocked on the door. A very attractive black woman answered, a pleasant smile at the ready. Her hair was tied back in a severe bun, emphasizing the high cheekbones. Age lines around the eyes and mouth, but nothing drastic. She was well dressed, kind of conservative. Anne Klein II. Her jewelry was noticeable but not too flashy. The overall impression: classy. Her smile seemed to fade when she saw him. "Can I help you?" "Mrs. Yeller?" She nodded slowly, as though not sure. "My name is Myron Bolitar. I'd like to ask you a few questions." The smile fled completely. "What about?" Her diction was different now. Less suburban civil. More street suspicious. ~ Harlan Coben

It took an entire month for Miranda's jaundice to clear up, and three more months for her skin to lighten from brownish orange to olive and for her black hair to fade to a softer brown. I will admit she did, indeed, appear to be Mexican. But that's no reason for a husband to accuse a woman of cheating. He ruined the birth. Up and ruined it. ~ Susan Reinhardt

I grew up thinking of her as our Elsie, not as someone else's mother. She was the black woman who had cleaned my parents' house once a week since 1975. She had worked for my grandparents for two decades before that. Until I was in high school, she was also the only black person I knew. ~ Kristen Green

Well, I'm saying that your intelligence comes from the blood of my people. Whenever they trot out some smart nigger and say, "See? Look how brilliant niggers are," what they usually show you is a part-white man with some nigger blood in him. This doesn't prove that niggers are great. On the contrary; it proves that white blood can make a part-nigger more intelligent. ~ George Lincoln Rockwell

When a woman dresses up for an occasion, the man should become the black velvet pillow for the jewel. ~ John Weitz

Some never spoke another word. Some never married. Some couldn't look at a woman again, even their own mothers and sisters. Some wanted to touch and hold lovers, but their arms could not embrace. ~ Daniel Black

But she's extraordinarily attractive, he thought, as, walking across Trafalgar Square in the direction of the Haymarket, came a young woman who, as she passed Gordon's statue, seemed, Peter Walsh thought (susceptible as he was), to shed veil after veil, until she became the very woman he had always had in mind; young, but stately; merry, but discreet; black, but enchanting. ~ Virginia Woolf

Gazing into the mirror, I saw myself as I was-a black silhouette in the room, a woman whose darkness had completely leaked through. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

She would do a mans work when she needed to, but she lived and died without ever putting on a pair of pants. She wore dresses. Being a widow, she wore them black. Being a woman of her time she wore them long. the girls of her day I think must have been like well wrapped gifts to be opened by their husbands on their wedding night, a complete surprise. 'Well! What's this!? ~ Wendell Berry

The river was beautiful and wise. There were the two of them being happy in a new way. For here, there was no man, no woman, no master, no yellow, no black, no white. We, we who were, we are the same no longer. ~ David Paul Kirkpatrick

I had a dream about you. Our relationship faded from red to white, and somewhere in the middle, in the pink zone, I told you I loved you and you returned it. However, at white, our relationship went black and I sought red in the arms of another woman. ~ Jarod Kintz

And though this encounter took place against an African sky, our brief enchantment symbolized the new world's greatest taboo - the hand of a very black man caressing the face of the blackest woman, with no shred of light entering into it, utter darkness alone representing God (71). ~ Kola Boof

Suspense is like a woman. The more left to the imagination, the more the excitement. ... The conventional big-bosomed blonde is not mysterious. And what could be more obvious than the old black velvet and pearls type? The perfect 'woman of mystery' is one who is blonde, subtle and Nordic. ... Although I do not profess to be an authority on women, I fear that the perfect title [for a movie], like the perfect woman is difficult to find. ~ Alfred Hitchcock

Roland G. Fryer Jr., while discussing his names research on a radio show, took a call from a black woman who was upset with the name just given to her baby niece. It was pronounced shuh-TEED but was in fact spelled "Shithead. ~ Anonymous

A Party for New Year (for Lily and Maisie, the ladies what lunch.)

Dear Lily,
I have bought something frilly,
to wear on New Year's Eve.
You may think it sounds rather silly,
and, what I tell you, you will never believe.

I met a woman in Primark, I know,
not my normal shop.
Just heard so much about it
inside I had to pop.

Well, the top I purchased, sparkles.
The frills upon it abound.
This woman I met in the changing room.
On me, she said it looked sound.

It's very, very silver you know.
A little bit like Lametta.
Oh Lily, I feel quite aglow.
On no one could it look any better.

Dear Maisie,
Things are looking a bit hazy.
A silver top, for New Year.
Are you really, really that crazy?
My word, you batty old dear.

I'm wearing my old faithful.
The black dress, with the gold trim.
It's not like we're doing anything special.
In fact proceedings sound quite grim.

Sitting on your old sofa
With a Baileys, if I'm lucky.
Watching the same old things on the box.
I'm not excited Ducky.

I want to be in the city
and feel the atmosphere.
It really is a pity
that you want to stay right here.

Dear Lily.
Now you are being silly.
What about your knees?
Standing about, feeling chilly,
and moaning you're going to freeze.

Much better to stay ~ Ann Perry

There is something about a woman,' said comedian and activist Dick Gregory. "If you look at all the suffering that black folks went through, not one black man would dare to sing 'Mississippi Goddamn.' Not one black man would say what Billie Holiday did about being lynched [in "Strange Fruit"]-they wasn't lynching women, they was lynching men, but it was women that talked about it, and nobody told them to talk about it. No manager going to tell you to talk about this, it's just something inside them. ~ Alan Light

The zenith of elegance in any woman's wardrobe is the little black dress, the power of which suggests dash and refinement. ~ Andre Leon Talley