1.
The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible
Toni Cade Bambara
2.
Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion. I've seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges.
Toni Cade Bambara
3.
(M)aybe we too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect . . . you know . . . like being people.
Toni Cade Bambara
4.
Revolution begins with the self, in the self.... We'd better take the time to fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, revolutionary relationships. Mouth don't win the war.
Toni Cade Bambara
5.
Writing is a legitimate way, an important way, to participate in the empowerment of the community that names me.
Toni Cade Bambara
6.
TAKE HEART TO FLAT OUT DECIDE TO BE WELL AND STRIDE INTO THE FUTURE, SANE AND
WHOLE
Toni Cade Bambara
7.
The only proper mask to wear in life is your own damn face.
Toni Cade Bambara
8.
The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.
Toni Cade Bambara
9.
When you dream, you dialogue with aspects of yourself that normally are not with you in the daytime and you discover that you know a great deal more than you thought you did.
Toni Cade Bambara
10.
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
11.
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
12.
Revolution begins with the self, in the self.
Toni Cade Bambara
13.
Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.
Toni Cade Bambara
14.
She [my mother] gave me permission to wonder, to dawdle, to daydream.
Toni Cade Bambara
15.
The dream is real, my friends. The failure to make it work is the unreality.
Toni Cade Bambara
16.
My responsibility to myself, my neighbors, my family and the human family is to try to tell the truth.
Toni Cade Bambara
17.
Reappraise the past, re-evaluate where we've been, clarify where we are, and predict or anticipate where we are headed. . . .
Toni Cade Bambara
18.
Take away the miseries and you take away some folks' reason for living.
Toni Cade Bambara
19.
Our lives preserved. How it was; and how it be. Passing it along in the relay. That is what I work to do: to produce stories that save our lives.
Toni Cade Bambara
20.
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
21.
Old folks are the nation.
Toni Cade Bambara
22.
When we ever invited the beast to dinner he didn't come in and swipe the napkins and start taking notes on the tablecloth 'bout how to take over the whole house?
Toni Cade Bambara
23.
What can defeat greed, technological superiority, and legal lawlessness ... is discipline, consciousness, and unity.
Toni Cade Bambara
24.
An artist represents an oppressed people and makes revolution irresistible.
Toni Cade Bambara
25.
What is happening to the daughters of the yam? Seem like they just don't know how to draw up the powers from the deep like before. Not full sunned and sweet anymore.
Toni Cade Bambara
26.
I tend to agree that celibacy for a time is worth considering, for sex is dirty if all it means is winning a man, conquering a woman, beating someone out of something, abusing each other's dignity in order to prove that I am a man, I am a woman.
Toni Cade Bambara
27.
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
28.
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
29.
And what is religion, you might ask. It's a technology of living.
Toni Cade Bambara
30.
One monkey don't stop no show. Not one, not six. The struggle continues.
Toni Cade Bambara
31.
We have not been scuffling in this waste - howling wilderness for the right to be stupid. All this waste.
Toni Cade Bambara
32.
It's a dismally lonely business, writing.
Toni Cade Bambara
33.
Medication without explanation is obscene.
Toni Cade Bambara
34.
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
35.
... 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
36.
I try to live [the Golden Rule] and I certainly expect it of some particular others. But I'll be damned if I want most folk out there to do unto me what they do unto themselves.
Toni Cade Bambara
37.
The story is a piece of work. The novel is a way of life.
Toni Cade Bambara
38.
Not all speed is movement.
Toni Cade Bambara
39.
old folks is the nation.
Toni Cade Bambara