74 Quotes by Ntozake Shange

  • Author Ntozake Shange
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    Being alive and being a woman is all I got, but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven’t conquered yet.

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  • Author Ntozake Shange
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    I’m a firm believer that language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives and other people’s lives.

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  • Author Ntozake Shange
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    I hit my head against the wall because I don’t want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don’t want to feel all these wretched things, but they’re in me already. If I don’t get rid of them, I’m not ever going to feel anything else.

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  • Author Ntozake Shange
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    The poems introduce the girls to other kinds of people of color, other worlds. To adventure, and kindness, and cruelty. Cruelty that we usually think we face alone, but we don’t. We discover that by sharing with each other we find strength to go on. The poems are the play’s first hint of the global misogyny that we women face.

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  • Author Ntozake Shange
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    Our society allows people to be absolutely neurotic and totally out of touch with their feelings and everyone else’s feelings, and yet be very respectable.

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  • Author Ntozake Shange
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    Sassafras had never wanted to weave, she just couldn’t help it. There was something about the feel of raw fleece and finished threads and dainty patterned pieces that was as essential to her as dancing to Carmen De Lavallade, or singing to Aretha Franklin. Her mama had done it, and her mama before that; and making cloth was the only tradition Sassafras inherited that gave her a sense of womanhood that was rich and sensuous, not tired and stingy.

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  • Author Ntozake Shange
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    Sisterhood is important because we are all we have to stand on. We have to stand near and by each other, pray for one another, and share the joys and the difficulties that women face in the world today. If we don't talk about it among ourselves, then we are made silent by the patriarchy, and that serves us no purpose.

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  • Author Ntozake Shange
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    Art gives us the opportunity to have clarity as well as hope that we might be able to survive a situation, or hope that we can find a way out of it without too much more injury to ourselves.

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