16 Quotes by Marita Golden

How could he warn her that the world resisted the addition of beauty, fought it tooth and nail. Should he tell her that her talent would spark envy and cruelty and that it would heal and answer prayers. Could he tell her of the sadness that would swallow her as soon as a canvas was finished, because created by human hands it was complete and still imperfect.

We knew no one man had killed the prophet. Rather, the combined weight of racism and an absence of moral courage had crushed him. A constitution ignored, laws denied, these were the weapons. America pulled the trigger.

To my father, who told me the stories that matter. To my mother, who taught me to remember them.

Everything I have learned about love, I learned from my mother. For it is mothers who bend, twist, flex, and break most dramatically before our uninitiated eyes. Fathers bear, conceal, inflict, sometimes vanish, so the mythology of domestic union tells us. But mothers absorb, accept, give in, all to tutor daughters in the syntax, the grammar of yearning and love.

I am a stranger to half measures. With life I am on the attack, restlessly ferreting out each pleasure, foraging for answers, wringing from it even the pain. I ransack life, hunt it down. I am the hungry peasants storming the palace gates. I will have my share. No matter how it tastes.

The symbiotic relationship between reading and writing is a cornerstone of our individual intellectual journey and our educational system. We write as an act of self-expression. We read because language renders unto us the vitality of real and imagined experience.

I am a stranger to half measures.

Racism is a virus. And since nobody’s really looking too hard for a cure it reproduces itself over and over again.

Imagination bound us stronger than love. Within its limitless borders we launched ships and love affairs, discovered lost worlds, made buildings and babies, found husbands, wrote letters and Broadway plays. We made ourselves up everyday.