Ishmael Faurang Quotes

The beauty of a girl is not in her dress neither in the thousand beautiful fake smiles she gives. The beauty is in her heart. The only way to find it, is to rip her heart in a good way. ~ Christian Thogolith

One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind. ~ Ishmael Reed

Hateful material travels the globe. A few years ago, CNN, America's Der Sturmer, ran a story about Black parents being so low down that they abandoned their children and the children had to eat rats. I was at a University in Wisconsin at the time and the mother of a student from South Africa called to see whether the story was true. She had seen it all the way over there. The story was untrue. The children lied. CNN never corrected the story. ~ Ishmael Reed

In Ishmael I articulated a living mythology that is so integral to our culture that it's never examined or even noticed by anyone. It's like the sound of blood rushing through your veins - you hear it so constantly that you don't hear it at all. ~ Daniel Quinn

I think Black intellectuals see too deeply. That's the problem. It's a cause of anxiety, because we see things differently. ~ Ishmael Reed

I don't know why people always compare me [ with Amiri Baraka] I was never part of the Black Arts Repertory Theater or the Black Arts Movement; people who claim that I was are wrong. I was downtown. I was living in Chelsea when they were operating in Harlem. ~ Ishmael Reed

A lot of great art comes from the Afro-American male experience. Black men are geniuses, and many times their desperation, their position as being pariahs, leads them to great originality. ~ Ishmael Reed

The great lesson I get from 'Moby-Dick' is that when the times are bad, when there is great foreboding, there are still ways to go about living. It's through Ishmael that I find a kind of overall cosmic approach to a meaningful life in this meaningless world. ~ Nathaniel Philbrick

When I say Afro-American aesthetic, I'm not just talking about the United States, I'm talking about the Americas. People in the Latin countries read my books because they share the same international aesthetic that I'm into and have been into for a long time. And it's multicultural. ~ Ishmael Reed

I grew up in Sierra Leone, in a small village where as a boy my imagination was sparked by the oral tradition of storytelling. At a very young age I learned the importance of telling stories - I saw that stories are the most potent way of seeing anything we encounter in our lives, and how we can deal with living. ~ Ishmael Beah

Richard Price got a million dollar advance on one fake film book based on a paragraph outline and is able to seduce gullible White reviewers who know less about ghetto life than he. The New York Times has devoted more space to Price's tourist, ghetto writing than to any Black writer in history. ~ Ishmael Reed

Whites have been the most subsidized group in the history of the United States and maybe the history of the world, while Blacks were enslaved and were the assets of Whites. ~ Ishmael Reed

Circumstances will change and things will be fine, just hold on a little more ~ Ishmael Beah

Children have the resilience to outlive their sufferings, if given a chance. ~ Ishmael Beah

You don't have to see it to love it. Just love it for it is good and that is love. ~ Christian Thogolith

My novels and poems are meant to be read aloud. That's why jazz musicians have been able to adapt my stuff. ~ Ishmael Reed

I took out my grenade and put my fingers inside the pin. 'Do you boys want this to be your last meal, or do you want to answer his question? ~ Ishmael Beah

Given all of the anti-Muslim propaganda that's being disseminated by The American Nazi media, you have to be careful. It can stress you out. ~ Ishmael Reed

The cultural wars of the sixties are over. I've reconciled with those who were my critics and opponents years ago. I was at odds with some those who were Black nationalists. Yet when feminists attempted to end my career and leave me as literary road kill, it was the Black nationalists who came to my rescue. ~ Ishmael Reed

I think there are fundamentalists all over the world. I think all religions have fundamentalists who have different interpretations of scriptures that are very vague. ~ Ishmael Reed

At night it felt as if we were walking with the moon. It followed us under thick clouds and waited for us at the other end of dark forest paths. It would disappear with sunrise but return again, hovering on our path. Some nights the sky wept stars that quickly floated and disappeared into the darkness before our wishes could meet them. Under these stars I used to hear stories, but now it seemed as if it was the sky that was telling us a story as its stars fell, violently colliding with each other. The moon hid behind clouds to avoid seeing what was happening. ~ Ishmael Beah

I reached the age of 70, because I have cultivated an association of multicultural intellectuals who are informed and alert to whatever "tricknology" that's laid on us by the powers that be. These include White ethnic intellectuals- people who know their roots- as well as Native American, Asian American, Hispanic and Black intellectuals. These are thirty, forty-year associations with some of the best minds around. Minds that are ignored by the media. ~ Ishmael Reed

My squad is my family, my gun is my provider, and protector, and my rule is to kill or be killed. ~ Ishmael Beah

I was glad to see other faces and at the same time disappointed that the war had destroyed the enjoyment of the very experience of meeting people. ~ Ishmael Beah

Human life, Borges said, is a cascade of possible directions, and we take only one, or we perceive that we take only one - which is how novels are written, too. You start with a blank page, and the first word opens up possibilities for the second word. If your first word is Call, those second two or three could be a doctor or it could be me Ishmael. It could be Call girls on Saturday nights generally cost more than . . . The second sentence opens up a multitude of third sentences, and on we go through that denseness of choices taken and choices not taken, swinging our machetes. ~ David Mitchell

He had watched her, after all, mourn her husband's death and it had been for her in part the discovery that grief could attach itself with permanence - something Ishmael had already discovered. It attached itself and then it burrowed inside and made a nest and stayed. It ate whatever was warm nearby, and then the coldness settled in permanently. You learned to live with it. ~ David Guterson

All art must be for the end of liberating the masses. A landscape is only good when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree. ~ Ishmael Reed

I lay in my bed night after night staring at the ceiling and thinking, Why have I survived the war? Why was I the last person in my immediate family to be alive? I didn't know. ~ Ishmael Beah

That morning we thanked the men who had helped bury Saidu. "You will always know where he is laid," one of the men said. I nodded in agreement, but I know that the chances of coming back to the village were slim, as we had no control over our future. We know only how to survive. ~ Ishmael Beah

The branches of the trees looked as if they were holding hands and bowing their heads in prayer. ~ Ishmael Beah

We took a bowl each and started eating. He went back into the little room, and by the time he returned to the table with his own bowl of food to eat with us, we had already finished. He was shocked and looked around to see if we had done something else with the food. ~ Ishmael Beah

61 lynchings occurred in 1920 alone. In 1921, 62, some of the victims, soldiers returning from the Great War who after fighting and winning significant victories - just as they had fought in the Revolutionary and Civil wars and the wars again the Indians - thought that America would repay them for the generosity of putting their lives on the line, for aiding in salvaging their hides from the Kaiser who had been tagged "enemy" this time. Instead, a Protestant country ignorant even of Western mysteries executes soldiers after a manner of punishments dealt to witches in the "Middle Ages." Europe and the Catholic Church are horrified but not surprised at this "tough guy" across the waters whose horrendous murders in Salem led Europe to reform its "witch laws. ~ Ishmael Reed

Some nights the sky wept stars that quickly floated and disappeared into the darkness before our wishes could meet them. ~ Ishmael Beah

But what have Cortes and Pizarro or the others to do with me?

You carry them in your blood as I carry the blood of Montezume; expeditions of them are harbored by your heart and your mind carries their supply trains. You've changed your helmet for a frontier hat while I have changed my robes for overalls and a black leather jacket. The costumes may have changed but the blood is still the same, gringo. ~ Ishmael Reed

Unfortunately, in the world today, we have dogmatic people entering into politics. I don't think the two mix. ~ Ishmael Reed

The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies. ~ Ishmael Reed

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. ~ Herman Melville

We all find joy and radiance and a reason to move on even in the most dire of circumstances. Even in chaos and madness, there's still a beauty that comes from just the vibrancy of another human spirit. ~ Ishmael Beah

I was afraid to fall asleep, but staying awake also brought back painful memories. Memories I sometimes wish I could wash away, even though I am aware that they are an important part of what my life is; who I am now. I stayed up all night, anxiously waiting for daylight, so that I could fully return to my new life, to rediscover happiness I had known as a child, the joy that had stayed alive inside me even through times when being alive itself became a burden. These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past. ~ Ishmael Beah

There's so much focus and interest about what happens during war, but very little about what happens when people return to homes and communities that have been destroyed. There's a renewal that happens, but it's a very difficult one. ~ Ishmael Beah

It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;--all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooners, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood; all this was thrilling. ~ Ishmael

We all knew that we could grieve only for a short while in order to continue staying alive. ~ Ishmael Beah

We all have that capacity to lose our humanity when circumstances force us to do so. It's not specific to people who live in Africa or Latin America or Asia. And equally, we are capable of regaining ourselves. ~ Ishmael Beah

David Simon goes to the Jewish Weekly and said he's made all this money, but he can't enjoy it because of criticism by people like Ishmael Reed. ~ Ishmael Reed

My conception of New York City came from rap music. I envisioned it as a place where people shot each other on the street and got away with it; no one walked on the streets, rather people drove in their sports cars looking for nightclubs and for violence. ~ Ishmael Beah

To Ishmael, the whale's indefinite whiteness' shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation. [It's] a color-less, all-color of atheism from which we shrink. ~ Herman Melville

We had not only lost our childhood in the war but our lives had been tainted by the same experiences that still caused us great pain and sadness. ~ Ishmael Beah

I put my hands behind my head and lay on my back, trying to hold on to the memories of my family. Their faces seemed to be far off somewhere in my mind, and to get to them I had to bring up painful memories. ~ Ishmael Beah