98 Quotes by Margo Jefferson

When he’s not lynching you, he’s humiliating you, said the men at the dinner table. They.

And out in the wide wide world, the famous women we gazed upon never stopped reminding us that we must cherish that generic female future.

Caucasian privilege lounged and sauntered, draped itself casually about, turned vigilant and commanding, then cunning and devious. We.

There was a girl, once upon a time and in your time. She embraced her life up to a point, then rejected it, and from that rejection have come all her difficulties.

Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can’t imagine you.

What I would have to do later, starting in college and in the years following, to become a person of inner consequence: break that fawning inner self into pieces.

Showing off was permitted, even encouraged, only if the result reflected well on your family, their friends, and your collective ancestors.

Every mind is a clutter of memories, images, inventions and age-old repetitions. It can be a ghetto, too, if a ghetto is a sealed-off, confined place. Or a sanctuary, where one is free to dream and think whatever one wants. For most of us it's both - and a lot more complicated.

Clever of me to become a critic. We critics scrutinize and show off to a higher end. For a greater good. Our manners, our tastes, our declarations are welcomed. Superior for life. Except when we're not. Except when we're dismissed or denounced as envious or petty, as derivatives and dependents by nature. Second class for life.