Toni Cade Bambara Quotes

Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

I'll be damned if I want most folks out there to do unto me what they do unto themselves. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

And what is religion, you might ask. It's a technology of living. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

In a capitalist society a man is expected to be an aggressive, uncompromising, factual, lusty, intelligent provider of goods,and the woman, a retiring, gracious, emotional, intuitive, attractive consumer of goods. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

The story is a piece of work. The novel is a way of life. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

For people sometimes believed that it was safer to live with complaints,
was necessary to cooperate with grief, was all right to become an accomplice in self-ambush ...
Take heart to flat out decide to be well and stride into the future sane and whole. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

Write a lot and hit the streets. A writer who doesn't keep up with what's out there ain't gonna be out there. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

There are times ... when any visitor - in person, by phone, by mail - is an intruder, a burglar, a space hogger, an oxygen taker, a chaos maker, a conflict inducer, a mood chaser, and a total drag. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

She wanted me to remember that pleasure is political
for the capacity to relax and play renews the spirit and makes it possible for us to come to the work of writing clearer, ready for the journey. (bell hooks about Toni Cade Bambara) ~ Bell Hooks

Take away the miseries and you take away some folks' reason for living. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

If your house ain't in order, you ain't in order. It is so much easier to be out there than in here. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

My responsibility to myself, my neighbors, my family and the human family is to try to tell the truth. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

People have to be given permission to write, and they have to be given space to breathe and stumble. They have to be given time to develop and to reveal what they can do. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

I've never been convinced that experience is linear, circular, or even random. It just is. I try to put it in some kind of order to extract meaning from it, to bring meaning to it. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

What can defeat greed, technological superiority, and legal lawlessness ... is discipline, consciousness, and unity. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

We have not been scuffling in this waste-howling wildness for the right to be stupid. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

All writers, musicians, artists, choreographers/dancers, etc., work with the stuff of their experiences. It's the translation of it, the conversion of it, the shaping of it that makes for the drama. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

Reappraise the past, re-evaluate where we've been, clarify where we are, and predict or anticipate where we are headed ... ~ Toni Cade Bambara

Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well? ... Just so's you're sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you're well. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

Medication without explanation is obscene. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

... got to give it all up, the pain, the hurt, the anger and make room for lovely things to rush in and fill you full. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

The springboard for your success is between your ears. ~ Toni Sorenson

Shadrack began a struggle that was to last for twelve days, a struggle to order and focus experience. It had to do with making a place for fear as a way of controlling it. ~ Toni Morrison

Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all. ~ Toni Morrison

Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires. Another sound enters but is upstaged by still another: the two circle each other and stop. Sometimes their words move in lofty spirals; other times they take strident leaps, and all of it is punctuated with warm-pulsed laughter - like the throb of a heart made of jelly. The edge, the curl, the thrust of their emotions is always clear to Frieda and me. We do not, cannot, know the meanings of all their words, for we are nine and ten years old. So we watch their faces, their hands, their feet, and listen for truth in timbre. ~ Toni Morrison

Are you healed? One sure way to tell if you've healed from your past pain is to be aware of how you feel when someone brings it up. Are you anxious, sad, emotional? If you are, the wound has not completely healed. But if you can hear a name from your past, recall a memory without flinching, then you know that your scar tissue is protecting you and that inside you're healthy and strong again. It's a wonderful feeling to feel nothing at all when your hurtful past doesn't hurt anymore. ~ Toni Sorenson

Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant within a human landscape. ~ Toni Morrison

This was maybe the first time she'd done it when she'd felt the true intimacy of it. The first time she'd done it because she wanted to express her feelings for a guy in some new way she hadn't before. The first time it meant something.
The fact was, sex with a man she cared for was making all other sex pale in comparison. No wonder sex with Mike had been the best of her life from the very start - caring for him had been ... destiny.
Destiny in Destiny. ~ Toni Blake

No wine here, baby girl. ~ Toni Aleo

It's been years since I tried to count the stars. I spent a lot of long teenage nights staring up there trying to count them. I needed to know their number. I remember waiting until the whole house was quiet, until my parents' soft voices in the room next to mine had stopped. I remember sneaking out the window in my nightie, no slippers on my feel, and lying down in the middle of the lawn. It was cold but I didn't care. I would stare at the sky, but the fucking things move. I tried to imagine the sky as a grid, drawing lines from objects on the ground. I tried scanning it with an aluminum-foil tube. I tried everything. Nothing works. ~ Toni Jordan

YOU REALLY DO impress me, you know."

Cade peered down at Brooke, who lay against his chest, curled up in the sheets of her bed. "Thanks. I even impressed myself with that one."

She chuckled. "I wasn't referring to that move you threw in at the end there. Although, yes, well done, you."

"Glad you approve."

"Actually, I was thinking about our conversation earlier, when you were talking about being out with Vaughn and Huxley."

"You're thinking about Vaughn and Huxley while we're lying in bed together? Not sure I like the sound of that."

She perked her head up and looked at him. "Oh . . . so that's not something you would ever consider? The three of you, you know . . . all at once? Because I kind of have this fantasy I was going to talk to you about."

Cade was about to laugh, but then she held his gaze so unflinchingly that for a split second he wondered if she was actually serious.

Okay . . . this definitely was not a conversation he'd ever expected to have with Brooke Parker of Sterling Restaurants, the Gorgeous Green Eyes, and Holy Shit She's Into Foursomes.

But then he saw the telltale sparkle in her eyes.

He exhaled. "You suck."

"Oh my God, you should've seen the look on your - " She cut off, laughing when he beaned her with one of the pillows. Then he bonked her two more times for good measure.

She sprawled across the bed when he'd finished, he ~ Julie James

I need the money, the security, because I might not have the blanket of support and love I have now forever. It could all end, and then I'll find myself at rock bottom, a strung-out stripper like my mother.
I can't let that happen.
I won't let that happen. ~ Toni Aleo

I've broken an arm before, but no one wanted to shoot me!' Suzie says. 'I mean, when you go to the emergency room I hope to God the doctors don't decide it might cost too much to care for.' -Suzie Schwab co-owner of East Maui Animal Refuge ~ Toni Polancy

Hate does that. Burns off everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemy's. ~ Toni Morrison

If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you'll be harmed by the read of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all day by themselves with no help from the mind. ~ Toni Morrison

A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order. ~ Toni Morrison

Every time you work out you strengthen your body. Every time you don't you weaken it. ~ Toni Sorenson

I believe that we belittle survivors by assuming that they will fail. ~ Toni Bernhard

Opera is musical theatre, and the music can teach you so much about the theatre. Very often I use musical terms to think about how I comport myself on stage: I employ 'rubati,' 'ostinati,' 'cadenze.' Finding these parallels is very fascinating for me. ~ Toni Servillo

Bliss, I don't normally do things like that. But I was second-guessing everything about coming here, and you were everything I needed. I don't know how many times I've stopped myself from coming over here and knocking on your door. And yes, seeing you with Cade was definitely motivation, but more than that ... I just like you, Bliss. As a teacher. As a person. As a guy. ~ Cora Carmack

I had started acting when I was 7, and I was always wrong. I would always get to the very end [of the audition], but I wasn't a perfect package of one thing. I wasn't a cliche, and it always worked against me. I wasn't pretty enough to play the popular girl, I wasn't mousy enough to be the mousy girl. Then there was a TV show that Toni Collette was starring in. And when a role to play a girl who was struggling with identity came, I thought: "Oh, this is what I was supposed to do. Everything's leading up to this moment." I was 18. I was like, "This is it." I didn't get it. And I was devastated. ~ Brie Larson

Don't fear experience. Embrace each one as a gift, a teacher, a step to get closer to where you want to be and who you want to become. ~ Toni Sorenson

Stay here with me, Trishy. Don't go back to your old life. Make a new one, here. With me. I know it's a hell of a big thing I'm asking - but I'm asking. Stay.
- Joe ~ Toni Blake

All she saw, down in the cellar well beneath the stoop, was a light yellow feather with a tip of green. And she had never named him. Had called him "my parrot" all these years. "My parrot." "Love you. "Love you."
Did the dogs get him? Or did he get the message - that she said, "My parrot" and he said, "Love you," and she had never said it back or even taken the trouble to name him - and manage somehow to fly away on wings that had not soared for six years. ~ Toni Morrison

No sirens. Let Parker drive," Frazer ordered. ~ Toni Anderson

In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book
leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity. ~ Toni Morrison

In 1969, I wrote a musical called 'Mother Earth.' It was a rock musical with an ecology theme. We did it at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Southern California where I was a member. It was a smash hit in this small theater. ~ Toni Tennille

Austin is a big music town, so growing up, I had a lot of local heroes. Toni Price I was very, very into; she was one of the first people I tried to emulate. She's a local Austin blues artist. Marsha Paul I was also a very big fan of. ~ Lauren Worsham

With Christ as your partner, there is no such thing as failure, only results. ~ Toni Sorenson

How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves. ~ Toni Morrison

We never shape the world . . . the world shapes us. ~ Toni Morrison

124 was spiteful. Full of baby's venom ~ Toni Morrison

I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma ... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important? ~ Toni Morrison

When you first start writing-and I think it's true for a lot of beginning writers-you're scared to death that if you don't get that sentence right that minute it's never going to show up again. And it isn't. But it doesn't matter-another one will, and it'll probably be better. And I don't mind writing badly for a couple of days because I know I can fix it-and fix it again and again and again, and it will be better. ~ Toni Morrison

Words can be arrows that inflict wounds. They can also be bandages that heal. ~ Toni Sorenson

But come on - tell me the proposal story, anyway."

She raised an eyebrow. "Really?"

"Really. Just keep in mind that I'm a guy, which means I'm genetically predisposed to think that whatever mushy romantic tale you're about to tell me is highly cheesy."

Rylann laughed. "I'll keep it simple, then." She rested her drink on the table. "Well, you already heard how Kyle picked me up at the courthouse after my trial. He said he wanted to surprise me with a vacation because I'd been working so hard, but that we needed to drive to Champaign first to meet with his former mentor, the head of the U of I Department of Computer Sciences, to discuss some project Kyle was working on for a client." She held up a sparkly hand, nearly blinding Cade and probably half of the other Starbucks patrons. "In hindsight, yes, that sounds a little fishy, but what do I know about all this network security stuff? He had his laptop out, there was some talk about malicious payloads and Trojan horse attacks - it all sounded legitimate enough at the time."

"Remind me, while I'm acting U.S. attorney, not to assign you to any cybercrime cases."

"Anyhow. . . we get to Champaign, which as it so happens, is where Kyle and I first met ten years ago. And the limo turns onto the street where I used to live while in law school, and Kyle asks the driver to pull over because he wants to see the place for old time's sake. So we get out of the limo, and he's making thi ~ Julie James

All important things are hard. ~ Toni Morrison

A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective; they are that. ~ Toni Morrison