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"In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietitude of every day life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must first get out of the way."
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"The commonplace books of the old Puritans were invaluable to them. They would never have been able to compile such works as they did if they had not been careful in collecting and arranging their matter under different heads."
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Personal Development
"The only lesson you can learn from history is that it repeats itself."
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"Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years."
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"What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past."
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"Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great."
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"Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It's a crime."Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment.Tengo went on, "Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves."
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"Mankind, not womankind, has slaughtered more humans in the name of God and Religion than for any other reason."
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"It is notorious that the news of the Emancipation Proclamation was kept from the people of Texas and not celebrated until 'Juneteenth'. There may be those in Texas now who believe they can insulate their state-a state that had its own courageous revolution-from the news of evolution and from the writing in 1786 of a Constitution that refuses to mention religion except when demarcating and limiting its role in the public square. But we promise them today that they will join their fore-runners in the flat-earth community, and in the mad clerical clique of those who believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Yes, they will be in schoolbooks-as a joke on the epic scale of William Jennings Bryan. We shall be fair, and take care to ensure that their tale is told."
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"Many if not most slaves would have each readily jumped, and many if not most slaves would each readily jump, at the opportunity to be a master, if such an opportunity presents or had presented itself."
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"Mr. Charles Dickens was serializing his novel Oliver Twist; Mr. Draper had just taken the first photograph of the moon, freezing her pale face on cold paper; Mr. Morse had recently announced a way of transmitting messages down metal wires. Had you mentioned magic or Faerie to any of them, they would have smiled at you disdainfully, except, perhaps for Mr. Dickens, at the time a young man, and beardless. He would have looked at you wistfully."
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"Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war."
Society
"There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how."
Wisdom
"I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man."
Relationship
"I'm always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else's contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we're demons."
Equality
"For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event."
Politics
"Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it."
Writing
"Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live."
Nature
"She knew Paul D was adding something to her life-something she wanted to count on but was scared to... His waiting eyes and awful human power. The mind of him that knew her own. Her story was bearable because it was his as well-to tell, to refine and tell again. The things neither knew about the other-the things neither had word-shapes for-well, it would come in time."
Relationship
"I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people."
Wisdom
"Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are."
Justice
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