Top 15 Toni Cade Bambara Quotes

There have been a lot of things in ... the Black experience for which there are no terms, certainly not in English at this moment. There are a lot of aspects of consciousness for which there is no vocabulary, no structure in the English language which would allow people to validate that experience through language. I'm trying to find a way to do that....I'm trying to break open and get at the bones, deal with symbols as though they were atoms. I'm trying to find out not only how a word gains meaning, but how a word gains power."

So used to being unwhole and unwell, one forgot what it was to walk upright and see clearly, breathe easily, think better than was taught, be better than one was programmed to believe—so concentration was necessary to help a neighbor experience the best of herself or himself. For people sometimes believed that it was safer to live with complaints, was necessary to cooperate with grief, was all right to become an accomplice in self-ambush.

Keep the focus on the action not the institution; don't confuse the vehicle with the objective; all cocoons are temporary and disappear

Silence. Stillness. To give her soul a chance to attend its own affairs at its own level.

Take away the miseries and you take away some folks’ reason for living. Their conversation piece anyway.

"I’m available to any and every adventure of the human breath.”

Then M’Dear Sophie always said, “Find meaning where you’re put, Vee.” So she exhaled deeply and tried to relax and stick it out and pay attention.”

Then the silence. A whole generation silent

She would not break her discipline to comfort herself in a shallow way. Would no more break discipline with her Self than she would her covenant with God.

Got to give it all up, the pain, the hurt, the anger and make room for lovely things to rush in and fill you full.

I'm attempting to blueprint for myself the merger of these two camps: the political and the spiritual. The possibilities of healing that split are exciting. The implications of actually yoking those energies and of fusing that power quite take my breath away.

Since the breakthrough achieved in the sixties by the Neo-Black Arts Movement, the possibilities are stunning. Characters that have been waiting in the wings for generations, characters that did not fit into the roster of stereotypes, can now be brought down center stage.

The short story is a piece of work. The novel is a way of life. When I replay the tapes on file in my head, tapes of speeches I've given at writing conferences over the years, I invariably hear myself saying "A writer, like any other cultural worker, like any other member of the community, ought to try to put her/his skills in the service of the community."

Muhammad Ali, in his autobiography, I Am the Greatest, defines a champion as one who takes the telling blow on the chin and hits the canvas hard, can't possibly rally, arms shot, energy spent, the very weight of the body too heavy a burden for the legs to raise, can't possibly get up. So you do. And you keep getting up. The Awakening by Kate Chopin is not my classic. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is. Sylvia Plath and the other obligatory writers on women's studies list-the writers who hawk despair, insanity, alienation, suicide, all in the name of protesting woman's oppression, are not my mentors. I was rasied on stories of Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Paul Robeson, and my grandmother, Annie, whom folks in Atlanta still remember as an early Rosa Parks.

For my own writing, I prefer the upbeat.