Shealyn Hansberry Quotes

In my mother's house there is still God."
Act 1, Scene 1 ~ A Raisin in the Sun ~ Lorraine Hansberry

Obviously the most oppressed of any oppressed group will be its women ~ Lorraine Hansberry

Beneatha: You didn't tell us what Alaiyo means ... for all I know, you might be calling me Little Idiot or something ...
...
Asagai: It means ... it means One for Whom Bread
Food
Is Not Enough. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

When a man knows that the abstraction ten exists - nothing on earth can stop him from looking for the fact of eleven. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

Something always told me I wasn't no rich white woman. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

Ball points belong to their age. They make everyone write alike. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

For if there are no waving flags and marching songs at the barricades as Walter marches out with his little battalion, it is not because the battle lacks nobility. On the contrary, he has picked up in his way, still imperfect and wobbly in his small view of human destiny, what I believe Arthur Miller once called "the golden threat of history." He becomes, in spite of those who are too intrigued with despair and hatred of man to see it, King Oedipus refusing to tear out his eyes, but attacking the Oracle instead. He is that last Jewish patriot manning his rifle at Warsaw; he is that young girl who swam into sharks to save a friend a few weeks ago; he is Anne Frank, still believing in people; he is the nine small heroes of Little Rock; he is Michelangelo creating David and Beethoven bursting forth with the Ninth Symphony. He is all those things because he has finally reached out in his tiny moment and caught that sweet essence which is human dignity, and it shines like the old star-touched dream that it is in his eyes. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

Of love and my parents, there is little to be written; their relationship to their children was utilitarian. We were fed and housed and dressed and outfitted with more cash than our associates and that was all. We were also vaguely taught certain vague absolutes: that we were better than no one but infinitely superior to everyone... ~ Lorraine Hansberry

You're a nice-looking girl ... all over. That's all you need, honey, forget the atmosphere. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

[T]here is only one large circle that we march in, around and around, each of us with our own little picture
in front of us
our own little mirage that we think is the future. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

I care. I care about it all. It takes too much energy NOT to care ... the WHY of why we are here is an intrigue for adolescents; the HOW is what must command the living. Which is why I have lately become an insurgent again. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

I started with Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee and Lou Gossett, Jr. and the rest of the wonderful cast of 'A Raisin In The Sun.' We were directed by the great Lloyd Richards. The play was written by the wonderful Lorraine Hansberry, and it was produced by Phil Rose. That's where my start was, so ... not a bad way to start. ~ Glynn Turman

I think that the human race does command its own destiny and that that destiny can eventually embrace the stars. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

What you ain't never understood is that I ain't got nothing, don't own nothing, ain't never really wanted nothing that wasn't for you. There ain't nothing as precious to me ... There ain't nothing worth holding on to, money, dreams, nothing else
~ Lorraine Hansberry

When you read the words of Langston Hughes you are reading the words of a Black Gay man. When you read the words of Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Angelina Weld Grimké, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, you are reading the words of Black Lesbians. When you listen to the life-affirming voices of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, you are hearing Black Lesbian women. When you see the plays and read the words of Lorraine Hansberry, you are reading the words of a women who loved women deeply. ~ Audre Lorde

I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from truthful identity of what is. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

I'm just tired of hearing about God all the time. What has He got to do with anything? ... I'm not going to be immoral or commit crimes because I don't believe. I don't even think about that. I just get so tired of Him getting the credit for things the human race achieves through its own effort. Now, there simply is no God. There's only man. And it's he who makes miracles. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

I think that the glorious thing about the human race is that it does change the world
constantly. The world or 'life' may seem to more often overwhelm the human being's capacity for struggling against being overwhelmed which is remarkable and exhilarating. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

I know he's rich. He knows he's rich, too. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

I look at you and I see the final triumph of stupidity in the world! ~ Lorraine Hansberry

It's dangerous, son."
"What's dangerous?"
"When a man goes outside his house to look for peace. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness, as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men - and people in general. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

Then isn't this rather all a false funeral? Can't it help you to see that there is something wrong when all the dreams in this house-good or bad-had to depend on something that might never have happened if a man had not died? We always say at home: Accident was at the first and will be at the last a poor tree from which the fruits of life may bloom. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

I will go home and much of what I will have to say will seem strange to the people of my village... But I will teach and work and things will happen, slowly and swiftly. At times it will seem that nothing changes at all... and then again... the sudden dramatic events which make history leap into the future. And then quiet again. Retrogression even. Guns, murder, revolution. And I even will have moments when I wonder if the quiet was not better than all that death and hatred. But I will look about my village at the illiteracy and disease and ignorance and will not wonder long. And perhaps... perhaps I will be a great man... I mean perhaps I will hold on to the substance of truth and find my way always with the right course... and perhaps for it I will be butchered in my bed some night by the servants of empire...

...perhaps the things I believe now for my country will be wrong and outmoded, and I will not understand and do terrible things to have things my way or merely to keep my power. Don't you see that there will be young men and women, not British soldiers then, but my own black countrymen... to step out of the shadows some evening and slit my then useless throat? Don't you see they have always been there... that they always will be. And that such a thing as my own death will be an advance? They who might kill me even... actually replenish me! ~ Lorraine Hansberry

That's what being eccentric means
being natural. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

Write if you will: but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be - if there is to be a world. Write about all the things that men have written about since the beginning of writing and talking - but write to a point. Work hard at it, care about it. Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don't pass it up. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don't pass it up. Use it. Good luck to you. The Nation needs your gifts.
Lorraine Hansberry speech, "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black," given to Readers Digest/United Negro College Fund creative writing contest winners, NYC, May 1, 1964. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

The grim possibility is that she who 'hides her brains' will, more than likely, end up with a mate who is only equal to a woman with 'hidden brains' or none at all. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

My inspiration for writing music is like Don McLean did when he did "American Pie" or "Vincent". Lorraine Hansberry with "A Raisin in the Sun". Like Shakespeare when he does his thing, like deep stories, raw human needs.

I'm trying to think of a good analogy. It's like, you've got the Vietnam War, and because you had reporters showing us pictures of the war at home, that's what made the war end, or that shit would have lasted longer. If no one knew what was going on we would have thought they were just dying valiantly in some beautiful way. But because we saw the horror, that's what made us stop the war.

So I thought, that's what I'm going to do as an artist, as a rapper. I'm gonna show the most graphic details of what I see in my community and hopefully they'll stop it quick.

I've seen all of that-- the crack babies, what we had to go through, losing everything, being poor, and getting beat down. All of that. Being the person I am, I said no no no no. I'm changing this. ~ Tupac Shakur

You aimin' to go the full circle now? How long before I have to come get you up from the sidewalks? You got hurt and pain in you? Well, I used to know a man who knew how to live with his pain and make his hurt work for him. Your daddy died with dignity; there wasn't no bum in him. And he known some hurts in this life you ain't never even heard of! ~ Lorraine Hansberry

Do you really think the rape of a continent dissolves in cigarette smoke? ~ Lorraine Hansberry

A status not freely chosen or entered into by an individual or a group is necessarily one of oppression and the oppressed are by their nature (i.e., oppressed) forever in ferment and agitation against their condition and what they understand to be their oppressors. If not by overt rebellion or revolution, then in the thousand and one ways they will devise with and without consciousness to alter their condition ~ Lorraine Hansberry

American straightforwardness is almost as disarming as Americans invariably think it is. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

There may be women to emerge who will be able to formulate a new and possible concept that homosexual persecution and condemnation has at its roots not only social ignorance, but a philosophically active anti-feminist dogma. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

Beneatha: Love him? There is nothing left to love.
Mama: There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing. (Looking at her) Have you cried for that boy today? I don't mean for yourself and for the family 'cause we lost the money. I mean for him: what he been through and what it done to him. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain't through learning - because that ain't the time at all. It's when he's at his lowest and can't believe in hisself 'cause the world done whipped him so! when you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

Seems like God don't see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams - but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

Never be afraid to sit awhile and think. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When he's done good and made things easy for everybody? That ain't the time at all. It's when he's at his lowest ... ... and he can't believe in himself because the world's whipped him so! ~ Lorraine Hansberry

There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

Our Southside is a place apart: each piece of our living is a protest. ~ Lorraine Hansberry