Quotes by Activists - Page 82

I've found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.
Alice Walker
The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.
Marge Piercy
Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
Alice Walker
I speak to the Black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition--about what we can endure, dream, fail at and survive.
Maya Angelou
If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.
Alice Walker
The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.
Rebecca Solnit
There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.
Grace Paley
I write to understand as much as to be understood.
Elie Wiesel
The only thing you should have to do is find work you love to do. And I can't imagine living without having loved a person. A man, in my case. It could be a woman, but whatever. I think, what I always tell kids when they get out of class and ask, 'What should I do now?' I always say, 'Keep a low overhead. You're not going to make a lot of money.' And the next thing I say: 'Don't live with a person who doesn't respect your work.' That's the most important thing—that's more important than the money thing. I think those two things are very valuable pieces of information.
Grace Paley
Writers don't write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don't. ...If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
Nikki Giovanni
When I am writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness. I'm trying for that. But I'm also trying for the language. I'm trying to see how it can really sound. I really love language. I love it for wate it does for us, how it allows us to explain the pain and the glory, the nuances and delicacies of our existence. And then it allows us to laugh, allows us to show wit. Real wit is shown in language. We need language.
Maya Angelou
Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design.
Helen Keller
What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,’.... And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.
Maya Angelou
The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world.
James Baldwin
Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake.
Maya Angelou
Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.
Elie Wiesel
I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
Nikki Giovanni
Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
Gloria Steinem
The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables.Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a dayI would be grounded, rooted.Said my head would not keep flying awayto where the darkness lives.The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight.Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do.I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling.You will find a good man soon.”The first psycho therapist told me to spendthree hours each day sitting in a dark closetwith my eyes closed and ears plugged.I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinkingabout how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth.Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happinesswhen they care more about what they givethan what they get.The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.”The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help meforget what the trauma said.The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems.Nobody wants to hear you cryabout the grief inside your bones.”But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumpedfrom the George Washington Bridgeinto the Hudson River convincedhe was entirely alone.”My bones said, “Write the poems.
Andrea Gibson
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Alice Walker
No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.
Ishmael Reed
Yielding to God's will can be hard. And sometimes, it really hurts. But it always brings peace.
John M. Perkins
Belief and faith are great, but very few peoplehave been led astray by thinking for themselves.
Leah Remini
If you think your religion requires discrimination, you're probably misreading your faith.
DaShanne Stokes
We must understand the essence of our faith to be something other than a list of opinions, propositions, or statements that our group holds but cannot prove. (p. 22)
Brian D. McLaren
History belongs to the intercessors - those who believe and pray the future into being.
Walter Wink
Please God, when I open my eyes, make this nightmare disappear.
Catherine Jane Fisher
Most reject the more repugnant or indefensible dogmas while still holding onto some core belief. Many believers will proudly describe themselves as "reasonable" or "rational" based on how little of their religion they still embrace versus how much they now reject. I think it's funny when people realize that the less you believe the more reasonable you are, but they stop before they reach the logical conclusion.
Aron Ra
Faith doesn't move mountains, but people with faith - and shovels - will move mountains in order to defend their faith.
Aron Ra
Belief in immortality is harmful because it is not in our power to conceive of the soul as really incorporeal. So this belief is in fact a belief in the prolongation of life, and it robs death of its purpose.
Simone Weil
Faith requires at times marching into the waters before they part.
Walter Wink
If you truly have faith in your convictions, then your convictions should be able to stand criticism and testing.
DaShanne Stokes
When I think of the Crucifixion, I commit the sin of envy.
Simone Weil
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.Never shall I forget that smoke.Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.Never.
Elie Wiesel
Intellect takes us along in the battle of life to a certain limit, but at the crucial moment it fails us. Faith transcends reason. It is when the horizon is the darkest and human reason is beaten down to the ground that faith shines brightest and comes to our rescue.
Mahatma Gandhi
He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.
Simone Weil
There is nothing anti-intellectual in the leap of faith, for faith is not believing without proof but trusting without reservation.
William Sloane Coffin Jr.
But I don't know how to fight. All I know how to do is stay alive.
Alice Walker
Maybe we are a little crazy. After all, we believe in things we don't see. The Scriptures say that faith is "being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see" (Heb. 11:1). We believe poverty can end even though it is all around us. We believe in peace even though we hear only rumours of wars. And since we are people of expectation, we are so convinced that another world is coming that we start living as if it were already here.
Shane Claiborne
Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits. It is intellectual bankruptcy.
Dan Barker
To believe that what has not occurred in history will not occur at all, is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man.
Mahatma Gandhi
Say I feel all sad and self-indulgent, then get stung by a wasp, my misery feels quite abstract and I long just to be in spiritual pain once more - 'damn you tiny assassin, clad in yellow and black, how I crave my former innocence where melancholy was my only trial'.
Russell Brand
I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings.
William Sloane Coffin Jr.
There's a long road of suffering ahead of you. But don't lose courage. You've already escaped the gravest danger: selection. So now, muster your strength, and don't lose heart. We shall all see the day of liberation. Have faith in life. Above all else, have faith. Drive out despair, and you will keep death away from yourselves. Hell is not for eternity. And now, a prayer - or rather, a piece of advice: let there be comradeship among you. We are all brothers, and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive.
Elie Wiesel
Faith is not something to grasp, it is a state to grow into.
Mahatma Gandhi
You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
Mahatma Gandhi
I don't tolerate politics that come from anger. I want a politics derived from beauty... I don't admire politicians, but poets. (Rubem Alves, p. 189)
Mev Puleo
To Have Without Holding:Learning to love differently is hard,love with the hands wide open, lovewith the doors banging on their hinges,the cupboard unlocked, the windroaring and whimpering in the roomsrustling the sheets and snapping the blindsthat thwack like rubber bandsin an open palm.It hurts to love wide openstretching the muscles that feelas if they are made of wet plaster,then of blunt knives, thenof sharp knives.It hurts to thwart the reflexesof grab, of clutch, to love and letgo again and again. It pesters to rememberthe lover who is not in the bed,to hold back what is owed to the workthat gutters like a candle in a cavewithout air, to love consciously,conscientiously, concretely, constructively.I can't do it, you say it's killingme, but you thrive, you glowon the street like a neon raspberry,You float and sail, a helium balloonbright bachelor's buttons blue and bobbingon the cold and hot winds of our breath,as we make and unmake in passionatediastole and systole the rhythmof our unbound bonding, to haveand not to hold, to lovewith minimized malice, hungerand anger moment by moment balanced.
Marge Piercy
The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
Muriel Rukeyser
Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
breathe in experience breathe out poetry
Muriel Rukeyser
If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core -- the fountain -- of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. (From "Poetry is Not a Luxury")
Audre Lorde
Paris and HelenHe called her: golden dawnShe called him: the wind whistlesHe called her: heart of the skyShe called him: message bringerHe called her: mother of pearl barley woman, rice provider, millet basket, corn maid, flax princess, all-maker, weefShe called him: fawn, roebuck, stag, courage, thunderman, all-in-green, mountain strider keeper of forests, my-love-ridesHe called her: the tree isShe called him: bird dancingHe called her: who stands, has stood, will always standShe called him: arriverHe called her: the heart and the womb are similarShe called him: arrow in my heart.
Judy Grahn
I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness
Muriel Rukeyser
See it was like this when we waltz into this place.A couple of papish cats is doing an Aztec two-stepAnd I says Dad let's cutbut then this dame comes up behind me see and says you and me could really existWow I says Only the next day she has bad teeth and really hates poetry.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I couldn't tell fact from fiction,Or if the dream was trueMy only sure predictionIn this world was you.I'd touch your features inchly. Beard love and dared the cost, The sented spiel reeled me unreal And I found my senses lost.
Maya Angelou
Come windless invaderI am a carnival ofStars, a poem of blood.
Sonia Sanchez
But I don't shut up and I don't die.I liveand fight, maddeningthose who rule my country.For if I liveI fight,and if I fightI contribute to the dawn.
Otto René Castillo
Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart.
Helen Keller