Quotes about Resilience

Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they brok its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.

God take what He would, she said. And He did, and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle who gave her freedom when it didn't mean a thing.

You have pissed your last in this house . . . and I don't make velvet roses anymore.

Her color is a cross she will always carry.

She is not so afraid at night because she is the color of it.

Tough shit, buddy. Your tough shit...

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

You are nothing but wilderness. No constraint. No mind. You shout the word—mind, mind, mind—over and over and then you laugh, saying as I live and breathe, a slave by choice.

Lay my head on the railroad line, Train come along, pacify my mind.

You accepted like a beast of burden the whip of a stranger's curse and the mindless menace it holds along with the scar it leaves as a definition you spend your life refuting although that hateful word is only a slim line drawn on a shore and quickly dissolved in a seaworld any moment when an equally mindless wave fondles it like the accidental touch of a finger on a clarinet stop that the musician converts into silence in order to let the true note ring out loud.

This is precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That's our job!" Toni Morrison

Although she has claim, she is not claimed. In the place where long grass opens, the girl who waited to be loved and cry shame erupts into her separate parts, to make it easy for the chewing laughter to swallow her all away.