Bessie Emery Head Quotes

There seemed to be ancient, ancestral lines drawn around the African man which defined his loyalties, responsibilities, and even the duration of his smile.

Whatever my manifold disorders are, I hope to get them sorted out pretty soon, because I've just got to tell a story."

You know, comrades,” he said, “I’ve got Hannetjie. I’ll betray him tomorrow.”

Be good comrades, my children. Cooperate, then life will run smoothly.

Dinorego was saying, ‘We can progress too, even though we are uneducated men. The mind of an uneducated man works like this: he is a listener and a believer. Most of all he is a believer.’

I have always been just me, with no frame of reference to anything beyond myself."

No words, however wise, could explain the awfulness of the death, not while the living were firmly attached to love, child-bearing, child-rearing, hunger, struggle, and the sunrise of tomorrow. Life had to flow all the time, for the living, like water in a stream.

Prostitutes, he was to decide, were the best type of women you'd find among all black women, unless a man wanted to be trapped for life by a dead thing. A prostitute laughed. She established her own kind of equality with men. She picked up a wide, vicarious experience that made her charter in a lively way, and she was so used to the sex organs of men that she was inclined to regard him as a bit more than a sex organ. Not so the dead thing most men married. Someone told that dead thing that a man was only his sex organs and functioned as such. Someone told her that she was inferior in every way to a man, and she had been inferior for so long that even if a door opened somewhere, she could not wear this freedom gracefully. There was no balance between herself and a man. There was nothing but this quiet, contemptuous, know-all silence between herself, the man and his functioning organs. And everyone called this married life, even the filthy unwashed children, the filthy unwashed floors, and piles of unwashed dishes.

You are young and might prefer to believe that love is moonlight and rosy sunsets. It is not. It is brutal, violent, ugly, possessive and dictatorial. It makes no allowances for the freedom and individuality of the loved one. Lovers become one closely knit unit in thought and feeling. Should you eventually find that this love is beyond your capacity or that you cannot rise to its demands, you may leave but please make sure that you go to some place where I will never be able to find you.

If you said no, no, no, and kept your claws in a people's heart, what else did you want but that they should all die?

A basically timid and cowardly person dare not presume to speak for others. He can only speak for himself. [A Personal View of the Survival of the Unfittest,

When people stumble upon magic they study it very closely, because all living people are, at heart, amateur scientists and inventors. Why must racialists make an exemption of the black man? Why must she come here and help the black man with a special approach: ha, ha, ha, you're never going to come up to our level of civilisation?

The rhythm of sunrise, the rhythm of sunset, filled her life.

it would seem to suggest that Africanness is not a natural state of existence, [but that] it must be performed

Most men want to achieve great victories ... But I am only looking for a woman.