Black Writers Quotes

“she was completely whole
and yet never fully complete”
― Maquita Donyel Irvin, Stories of a Polished Pistil: Lace and Ruffles

“Reinvent yourself over and over and over and over and over until you find home. There is no timeline for the soul.”
― Malebo Sephodi

“The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.
They hear the first and last of every Tree
Speak to humankind today. Come to me, here beside the River.
Plant yourself beside the River.”
― Maya Angelou

“I am a flower breaking ground.”
― Bethanee Epifani J. Bryant

“As a Black Woman, I define self-care as the ability to safely and comfortably exhale.”
― Bethanee Epifani J. Bryant, Don't Fall Prey! Dating Tales, Trials, & Triumphs

“Sociologically, politically, psychologically, spiritually, it was never enough for James Baldwin to categorize himself as one thing or the other: not just black, not just sexual, not just American, nor even just as a world-class literary artist. He embraced the whole of life the way the sun’s gravitational passion embraces everything from the smallest wandering comet to the largest looming planet.”
― Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays

“There is plenty of work that needs to be done by men to dismantle patriarchy”
― Malebo Sephodi, Miss Behave

“I want to live in a society where we are all liberated. This is what my feminism looks like”
― Malebo Sephodi, Miss Behave

“Whatever good you have to bring into the world will be beneficial and it will be more than enough.”
― Bethanee Epifani J. Bryant

“Through Miss Behave I am attempting to reclaim my voice one word at a time and live my truth to the best of my ability”
― Malebo Sephodi, Miss Behave

“LEGACY IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE LIVING!”
― Qwana M. "BabyGirl" Reynolds-Frasier

“In America the magazines in which one can frequently publish stories or poems about Negroes are very few, and most of these do not pay, since they are of a social service or proletarian nature. The big American bourgeois publications are very careful about what they publish by or about colored people. Exotic or humorous tales they will occasionally use. Stories that show Negroes as savages, fools, or clowns, they will often print. And once in a blue moon there may be a really sound and serious literary picture of black life in a big magazine--but it doesn't happen often enough to feed an author. They can't live on blue moons. Most colored writers find their work turned down with a note that the files are already full of "Negro material," or that the subject is not suitable, or, as happened to me recently when I submitted a story about a more or less common situation in American interracial life--the manuscript was returned with regrets since the story was "excellently written, but it would shock our good middle-class audience to death." And thus our American publications shy away from the Negro problem and the work of Negro writers.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“I am a black woman. Don't look beyond me. Don't see through me. Look me in the eye. Hold my gaze. Listen to my heart. See my soul. See me for who I am, not what you would like me to be. Accept or reject but don't hide from my truth.”
― Janet Autherine, The Heart and Soul of Black Women: Poems of Love, Struggle and Resilience

“To love is to be brave. To love is to operate in your natural state.”
― Bethanee Epifani J. Bryant, Don't Fall Prey! Dating Tales, Trials, & Triumphs

“The woman who gave her baby away. The woman who told the world her baby was dead. She is a coward and I am the thing she fears the most. The litter from her belly, the filthy issue, the prodigal daughter.”
― Sara-Jayne King, Killing Karoline

“You know, in Sophiatown we had very few educated Africans, but they were so broad in their reading. They all had books in their pockets. My husband was one of them. I don't think I would have stayed very long with him if he were different.”
― Miriam Tlali

“When a group has internalised their oppression, they may find themselves unable to imagine living without it”
― Malebo Sephodi, Miss Behave

“Each chapter in MissBehave is about navigating life as a black woman and all encounters that led me to espouse feminist ideals”
― Malebo Sephodi, Miss Behave

“SUGGESTIONS WITHOUT RIGHTEOUS SOLUTIONS IS JUST SARCASM”
― Qwana Reynolds-Frasier, Friend In Your Pocket

“...I am ready for a love that beats strong and incessantly -- a hummingbird type love...”
― Bethanee Epifani J. Bryant

“My passion for social justice and uplifting people also serves as my inspiration.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“Stay wif da real and da real g'on stay wif 'chu!”
― Panther Optikonz

“Come close, be my buddy, then after a while call me nigga - it won't affect our friendship one bit. But out of the blue if you walk up to me as a complete stranger and call me that, then you only deepen the wounds caused by white oppressors throughout human history.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Şehit Sevda Society: Even in Death I Shall Live

“But I seemed unable to do anything that pleased anyone and that included me, my own self, though at that time I did not know that myself constituted such a thing as existence”
― Jamaica Kincaid, See Now Then

“About the time I was 17 and graduated from high school, I went to Harlem, and that was a most beautiful place where, fortunately for me, I came into, or rather, ran into, the hands of some wonderful people, people who formed an important part of the so-called Black Renaissance. They were people like Langston Hughes, Wally Thurmond, Bud Fisher, all really wonderful writers. I lived in the YMCA where you could rent a room for $2 a week and they put all the regular inhabitants up on the 11th floor. Among them were people like Charlie Drew, who became the developer of blood plasma, distinguished physicians, physics people, and biologists.”
― Oliver W. Harrington, Why I Left America and Other Essays

“But that afternoon there was an orchestra playing. Music filling the brownstone. Black fingers pulling violin bows and strumming cellos, dark lips around horns, a small brown girl with pale pink nails on flute. Malcolm’s younger brother, his dark skin glistening, blowing somberly into a harmonica. A broad‐shouldered woman on harp. From my place on the stairs, I could see through the windows curious white people stopping in front of the building to listen.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“They wrote, yes. But thousands could, if someone would bother to teach them. And everything they wrote was written for whites. Petitions. Appeals. It's another of this world's laws. Blacks will write only about suffering, and only for white people, as if out purpose here is to change their mind.”
― Sara Collins

“I am courageous because, despite it all, I still choose to love.”
― Bethanee Epifani J. Bryant, Don't Fall Prey! Dating Tales, Trials, & Triumphs

“Some callings come to you only in memory. Some come only on the mouth of someone you trust. Some don’t need to be heard in order to be lived. And not all calls come from outside of you.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“The greatest act of revolution for any black woman is to put pen to paper with purpose.”
― Stalina Goodwin, Daughters of Zora: Affirmations for Black Women Writers