Toni Cade Bambara Quotes

The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible

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.

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.

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

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

Revolution begins with the self, in the self.

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

Not all speed is movement.

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

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

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

The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.

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.

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.

Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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