Toni Cade Bambara Quotations

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.

Revolution begins with the self, in the self.

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

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

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.

The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.

The dream is real, my friends. The failure to realize it is the only unreality.

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.

The dream is real, my friends. The failure to make it work is the unreality.

Not all speed is movement.

What can defeat greed, technological superiority, and legal lawlessness ... is discipline, consciousness, and unity.

It's a dismally lonely business, writing.

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.

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

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.

old folks is the nation.

Medication without explanation is obscene.

The only proper mask to wear in life is your own damn face.

One monkey don't stop no show. Not one, not six. The struggle continues.

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.

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.

An artist represents an oppressed people and makes revolution irresistible.

The story is a piece of work. The novel is a way of life.

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.

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.

(M)aybe we too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect . . . you know . . . like being people.

... 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.

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.

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

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.

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

My mother, religious-negro, proud of having waded through a storm, is, very obviously a sturdy bridge that I have crossed over on.

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.

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?

Take away the miseries and you take away some folks' reason for living.

TAKE HEART TO FLAT OUT DECIDE TO BE WELL AND STRIDE INTO THE FUTURE, SANE AND WHOLE

Old folks are the nation.

Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.

She [my mother] gave me permission to wonder, to dawdle, to daydream.

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.

Writing is a legitimate way, an important way, to participate in the empowerment of the community that names me.

The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible