Ntozake Shange Quotes

• I'm a firm believer that language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives and other people's lives.

  Ntozake Shange

  People, Use, Brilliant

  66 Copy quote

• Creation is everything you do. Make something.

  Ntozake Shange

  Creativity, Creation

  Ntozake Shange (2010). “Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo: A Novel”, p.58, Macmillan

  57 Copy quote

• I write for young girls of color, for girls who don’t even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive. I can only change how they live, not how they think.

  Ntozake Shange

  Girl, Writing, Thinking

  "Back at you". Interview with Rebecca Carroll, www.motherjones.com. January 1995.

  74 Copy quote

• i found god in myself and i loved her i loved her fiercely

  Ntozake Shange

  Love, God, Healing

  87 Copy quote

• Where there is a woman there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits.

  Ntozake Shange

  Inspiring, Fall, Moon

  Ntozake Shange (2010). “Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo: A Novel”, p.9, Macmillan

  80 Copy quote

• I am gonna write poems til i die and when i have gotten outta this body i am gonna hang round in the wind and knock over everybody who got their feet on the ground.

  Ntozake Shange

  Writing, Wind, Feet

  39 Copy quote

• Where there is a woman there is magic.

  Ntozake Shange

  Women, Magic, Tiaras

  Ntozake Shange (2010). “Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo: A Novel”, p.9, Macmillan

  65 Copy quote

• When I die, I will no be guilty of having left a generation of girls behind thinking that anyone can tend to their emotional health other than themselves.

  Ntozake Shange

  Girl, Emotional, Thinking

  39 Copy quote

• my spirit is too ancient to understand the separation of soul & gender

  Ntozake Shange

  Soul, Spirit, Separation

  Ntozake Shange (2010). “For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf”, p.45, Simon and Schuster

  52 Copy quote

• somebody/ anybody sing a black girl's song bring her out to know herself to know you but sing her rhythms carin/ struggle/ hard times sing her song of life she's been dead so long closed in silence so long she doesn't know the sound of her own voice her infinite beauty she's half-notes scattered without rhythm/ no tune sing her sighs sing the song of her possibilities sing a righteous gospel let her be born let her be born & handled warmly.

  Ntozake Shange

  Girl, Song, Struggle

  Ntozake Shange (2010). “For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf”, p.4, Simon and Schuster

  54 Copy quote

• I'm committed to the idea that one of the few things human beings have to offer is the richness of unconscious and conscious emotional responses to being alive. ... The kind of esteem that's given to brightness/smartness obliterates average people or slow learners from participating fully in human life, particularly technical and intellectual life. But you cannot exclude any human being from emotional participation.

  Ntozake Shange

  Emotional, Ideas, Average

  48 Copy quote

• Right now being born a girl is to be born threatened.

  Ntozake Shange

  Girl, Women, Born

  48 Copy quote

• our dreams draw blood from old sores.

  Ntozake Shange

  Dream, Blood, Draws

  Ntozake Shange (1985). “Spell number seven”

  35 Copy quote

• Being alive and being a woman is all I got, but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't conquered yet.

  Ntozake Shange

  Women, Feminist, African American

  45 Copy quote

• Our society allows people to be absolutely neurotic and totally out of touch with their feelings and everyone else's feelings, and yet be very respectable.

  Ntozake Shange

  People, Feelings, Our Society

  33 Copy quote

• The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.

  Ntozake Shange

  Pain, Kindness, Confused

  Ntozake Shange (2010). “Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo: A Novel”, p.36, Macmillan

  32 Copy quote

• in our ordinaryness we are most bizarre.

  Ntozake Shange

  Bizarre, Ordinariness

  26 Copy quote

• I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager. . .and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that. . .

  Ntozake Shange

  Teenager, Writing, Thinking

  25 Copy quote

• one thing I don’t need is any more apologies i got sorry greetin me at my front door you can keep yrs i don’t know what to do wit em they don’t open doors or bring the sun back they don’t make me happy or get a mornin paper didn’t nobody stop usin my tears to wash cars cuz a sorry.

  Ntozake Shange

  Sympathy, Sorry, Apology

  Ntozake Shange, “'Sorry'”

  30 Copy quote

• I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.

  Ntozake Shange

  Wall, Want, Terrible

  25 Copy quote

• And this is for Colored girls who have considered suicide, but are moving to the ends of their own rainbows.

  Ntozake Shange

  Girl, Suicide, Moving

  "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide". Choreopoem by Ntozake Shange, 1976.

  34 Copy quote

• When words & manners leave you no space for yourself
  make
  very personal
  very clear
  & your obstructions will join you or disappear.

  Ntozake Shange

  Space, Manners, Disappear

  26 Copy quote

• i usedta live in the world really be in the world free & sweet talkin good mornin & thank-you & nice day uh huh i cant now i cant be nice to nobody nice is such a rip-off regular beauty & a smile in the street is just a set-up

  Ntozake Shange

  Sweet, Nice, Rip

  13 Copy quote

• nice is such a rip-off.

  Ntozake Shange

  Nice, Rip, Niceness

  Marvin Cohen, J. Gilhooley, M. Pinero, David Rabe, Ntozake Shange (1986). “Plays from the New York Shakespeare Festival”, Broadway Play Publishing

  8 Copy quote

• Novels allow me to create a whole world.

  Ntozake Shange

  World, Novel, Whole

  5 Copy quote

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