Jamie Park > Jamie's Quotes

“This virus will leave us entirely newborn people. We will all be different, none of us will ever be the same again. We will have deeper roots, be made of denser soil, and our eyes will have seen things.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“it was the right thing to do, but she had no right to do it.

(Introduction)”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“He suspected most of the real answers concerning slavery, lynching, forced labor, sharecropping, racism, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, prison labor, migration, civil rights and black revolution movements were all about money. Money withheld, money stolen, money as power, as war. Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks’ hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running.”
― Toni Morrison, God Help the Child

“Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real
information, but it tells you next to nothing.”
― Toni Morrison

“If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”
― Toni Morrison

“Why not? I can be miserable if I want to. You don't need to try and make it go away. It shouldn't go away. Its just as sad as it ought to be and I'm not going to hide from what's true just because it hurts.”
― Toni Morrison, Home

“It comforts everybody to think of all Negroes as dirt poor, and to regard those who were not, who earned good money and kept it, as some kind of shameful miracle. White people liked that idea because Negroes with money and sense made them nervous. Colored people liked it because, in those days, they trusted poverty, believed it was a virtue and a sure sign of honesty. Too much money had a whiff of evil and somebody else's blood.”
― Toni Morrison

“For the mouths of her children quickly forgot the taste of her nipples, and years ago they had begun to look past her face into the nearest stretch of sky.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“I didn't kill him, I just fucked him”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“An editor is like a priest or a psychiatrist; if you get the wrong one then you are better off alone.”
― Toni Morrison

“In a way she was jealous of death.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“his mild cynicism morphed into depression.”
― Toni Morrison, God Help the Child

“Female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when—especially when—it is seen through the prism of economic freedom.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“Good editors are really the third eye. Cool. Dispassionate. They don’t love you or your work.”
― Toni Morrison

“I can't tell you why I was in love with her. People didn't require that much as they do now. Folks were expected to be civilized to one another, honest, and - and clear. You relied on people being what they said they were, because there was no other way to survive.”
― Toni Morrison

“For a nickel a month, Lady Jones did what whitepeople thought unnecessary if not illegal: crowded her little parlor with the colored children who had time for and interest in book learning.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“I always know the ending; that’s where I start.”
― Toni Morrrison

“They did not believe death was accidental—life might be, but death was deliberate.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.”
― Toni Morrison

“Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that supposed to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“You are worthy to be seen. You are worthy to be heard. You are worthy to be sat with, to be walked beside. Even in your quietest moments, you are worthy of witness.”
― Toni Morrison

“You can’t protect her every minute.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present—intolerable—and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“I don’t think many people appreciate silence or realize that it is as close to music as you can get”
― Toni Morrison, God Help the Child

“Make no mistake, the privatization of prisons is less about unburdening taxpayers than it is about providing bankrupt communities with sources of income and especially about providing corporations with a captured population available for unpaid labor.”
― Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

“Because whites are not socialized to see ourselves collectively, we don't see our group's history as relevant. Therefore, we expect people of color to trust us as soon as they meet us. We don't see ourselves as having to earn that trust.”
― Robin DiAngelo, What Does It Mean to Be White?: Developing White Racial Literacy

“Racism is a complex and interconnected system that adapts to challenges over time. Colorblind ideology was a very effective adaptation to the challenges of the Civil Rights Era. Colorblind ideology allows society to deny the reality of racism in the face of its persistence, while making it more difficult to challenge than when it was openly espoused.”
― Robin DiAngelo, What Does It Mean to Be White?: Developing White Racial Literacy

“Our police force was not created to serve black Americans; it was created to police black Americans and serve white Americans.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

“Poverty is so concentrated because it is generational and, research shows, created with relentless intention.”
― Wes Moore, Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City

“Our society's insistence on limiting help to those who "deserve it," as indicated by their status in the labor market, has a profound impact on the capacity of those living in deep poverty to escape ... we also cannot defend the inhumane debate about who are the deserving versus the undeserving poor.”
― Wes Moore