Quotes about Struggle

Always in the middle of our bloodiest battles you lay down your arms like flowering mines to conqueror me home.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?

For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.

The black unicorn was mistaken for a shadow or symbol and taken through a cold country where mist painted mockeries of my fury.

Each of us struggles daily with the pressures of conformity and the loneliness of difference from which those choices seem to offer escape.

Staples sees in Ntozake Shange's play For Colored Girls a collective appetite for black male blood. Yet it is my female children and my black sisters who lie bleeding all around me, victims of the appetites of our brothers.

As a living creature I am part of two kinds of forces--growth and decay, sprouting and withering, living and dying, and at any given moment in our lives, each one of us is actively located somewhere along a continuum between those two forces.

Fair, fair, what's fair, you think? Is fair you want, look in god's face.' My mother was busily dropping onions into the tin. She paused, and turning around, held my puffy face up, her hand beneath my chin. Her eyes so sharp and furious before, now just looked tired and sad.

There was a pain in Muriel to become herself that engaged my heart. I knew what it was like to be haunted by the ghost of a self one wished to be, but only half-sensed. Sometimes her words both thrilled me and made me weep.

Is this pain and despair that surround me a result of cancer, or has it just been released by cancer? I feel so unequal to what I always handled before, the abominations outside that echo the pain within.

They convinced me meaning they had dragged her 4'10 Black Woman's frame over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval until she let go the first real power she ever had and lined her own womb with cement to make a graveyard for our children.

This kind of action is a prevalent error among oppressed peoples. It is based upon the false notion that there is only a limited and particular amount of freedom that must be divided up between us, with the largest and juiciest pieces of liberty hging as spoils to the victor or the stronger. So instead of joining together to fight for more, we quarrel between ourselves for a larger slice of the one pie.