73 Quotes by Darryl Pinckney

IN the book of my heart, pages keep falling out, many of them marked "Mom and Dad.

Some books you never get over, like a first love. Some books that made an enormous impression on you when you were young you are afraid to read again years later, like being sorry you met that former love for coffee, because you couldn’t see what you once saw. But there are those few books that can still move you in the old, throbbing way.""How I got over

I can see criticizing, complaining, protesting – anything but choosing not to vote. Too many people died for us not to vote.

Identity has several parts, and the self needs to expand. Black youth should be encouraged to have as many parts or as rich an identity as possible. It’s a form of allowing them to be curious about the world.

Economic justice is not just something blacks are crying out for; whites are desperate for it, too. But in the public imagination, the face of poverty is black. In all actuality, the face of poverty is white.

Freedom is having real choice. This offers a limited amount of choices. This is participating in a very imperfect system that we’re desperately hanging onto, that we don’t want to see further eroded.

When you are writing the kind of criticism you hope you’re writing, everything depends on keeping your calm or your cool. You’re trying to tell someone about something that they may know nothing about. They depend on you to read or interpret as best as you can.

There’s a class divide in black America that doesn’t seem to trouble black Americans so much, but whites use it and exploit it. The progress of a few is allowed to stand for the progress of everyone. We can’t afford that kind of disaffection at the moment.

Being a liberal progressive has been demonized as anti-white or overly on the side of blacks. There’s nothing that can be done about that; it’s just where we are in the history of our perceptions.