Top 15 John Edgar Wideman Quotes

Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up. But the writing is a way of not allowing those things to destroy you.

Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words — rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition — children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down.

All Stories are True.

Do not fall asleep in your enemy's dream.

Thank you, Jesus, for blindness that every once in a great while allows one of us to hit the target.

They beat me, and fucked me in every hole I had. I was their whore. Their maid. A stool they stood on when they wanted to reach a little higher. But I never sang in their cage, Bobby. Not one note.

Looking at each other like, What the fuck's going on here? We big-time undercover supercops.

Paradise Lost is a poem. The old, blind bastard's trying to sing to you. Listen, as the Isley Brothers say, to the music. You must learn to do that before you can expect to understand. Slowly. Slowly. A few licks at a time.

Too much is made for us; too much is given to us - even those of us who are underprivileged. The poverty is given to us. The difficulties are given to us.

One of the earliest lessons I learned as a child was that if you looked away from something, it might not be there when you looked back.

A great artist transforms our world, removes scales from our eyes, plugs from our ears, gloves from our fingertips and teaches us to perceive reality differently.

The two of you well fed, tanned, pretty, Beg pardon folks, just passing through, through the cesspool your bad intentions and good intentions created, the sewage in which human beings must make lives for themselves swimming in centuries of your filth. What did you imagine yourselves doing. What do you imagine you're doing with me. What gives you the right to rub the privilege of your whiteness, your immunity, in dying people's faces. Slinking through a place so down and out even niggers with nothing to lose avoid it if they can. Dog-eat-dog back-of-the-wall and at night too. Who the fuck did you think you were. What kind of daydream were you strolling around in.

I think I was kind of melancholy as a kid. I spent a lot of time inside my own head, a lot of time sort of staring into space wondering the hell was going on.

They killed everyone in the camps. The whole world was dying there. Not only Jews. Even a black woman. Not gypsy. Not African. American like you, Mrs. Clara.

They said she was a dancer and could play any instrument. Said she could line up shoes from many countries and hop from one pair to the next, performing the dances of the world. They said the Queen of Denmark honored her with a gold trumpet. But she was there, in hell with the rest of us.

A woman like you. Many years ago. A lifetime ago. Young then as you would have been. And beautiful. As I believe you must have been, Mrs. Clara. Yes. Before America entered the war. Already camps had begun devouring people. All kinds of people. Yet she was rare. Only woman like her I saw until I came here, to this country, this city. And she saved my life.

Poor thing.

I was just a boy. Thirteen years old. The guards were beating me. I did not know why. Why? They didn't need a why. They just beat. And sometimes the beating ended in death because there was no reason to stop, just as there was no reason to begin. A boy. But I'd seen it many times. In the camp long enough to forget why I was alive, why anyone would want to live for long. They were hurting me, beating the life out of me but I was not surprised, expected no explanation. I remember curling up as I had seen a dog once cowering from the blows of a rolled newspaper. In the old country lifetimes ago. A boy in my village staring at a dog curled and rolling on its back in the dust outside a baker's shop and our baker in his white apron and tall white hat striking this mutt again and again. I didn't know what mischief this dog had done. I didn't understand why the fat man with flour on his apron was whipping it unmercifully. I simply saw it and hated the man, felt sorry for the animal, but already the child in me understood it could be no other way so I rolled and curled myself against the blows as I'd remembered the spotted dog in the dusty village street because that'

Real change is always violent, but it may hurt a lot less than what's in place before the violence occurs.