Gloria Naylor Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

Spoiled. That's all it's about — can't live without this, can't live without that. You can live without anything you weren't born with, and you can make it through on even half of that.

Gloria Naylor
What an artist must do today is what artists started out doing with the cave markings and drawings in Dordogne — reach beyond the base machinations of their respective societies, in toward the space that sits apart from the bestial and testify to that space; document the existence of a core humanity; and with the documentation give witness to the same.

Gloria Naylor
Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.

Gloria Naylor
Everybody wants to be right in a world where there ain't no right or wrong to be found.

Gloria Naylor
No one cries when a street dies. There's no line of mourners to walk behind the coffin wheeled on the axis of the earth and lidded by the sky. No organ-piped dirges, no whispered prayers, no eulogy.

Gloria Naylor
It's as if I've arrived in a place where it's all spirit and no body -- an overwhelming sense of calm... I actually began to feel blessed.

Gloria Naylor
Really listen this time: the only voice is your own.

Gloria Naylor
A myth is more powerful — and more lasting — than reality.

Gloria Naylor
I don't believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or to make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.

Gloria Naylor
The last time you're doing something — knowing you're doing it for the last — makes it even more alive than the first.

Gloria Naylor
We don't put up decorations here for the holidays. There are too many different kinds of people in and out, and to make it festive for one's tradition is to give slight to the other's. Everybody in the world isn't a Christian. The truth is, most people in the world aren't Christians.

Gloria Naylor
A star dies in heaven every time you snatch away someone's dream.

Gloria Naylor
Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over.

Gloria Naylor
Now me, when I want ready-made trouble, I dig up a handsome man.

Gloria Naylor
One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.

Gloria Naylor
Time is a funny thing. I was always puzzled with the way a single day could stretch itself out to the point of eternity in your mind, all while years melted down into the fraction of a second.

Gloria Naylor
A loud voice is not always angry; a soft voice not always to be dismissed; and a well-placed silence can be the indisputable last word.

Gloria Naylor
Home. It's being new and old all rolled into one. Measuring your new against old friends, old ways, old places. Knowing that as long as the old survives, you can keep changing as much as you want without the nightmare of waking up to a total stranger.

Gloria Naylor
Six months of looking for a job had made me an expert at picking out the people who, like me, were hurrying up to wait — in somebody's outer anything for a chance to make it through their inner doors to prove that you could type two words a minute, or not drool on your blouse while answering difficult questions about your middle initial and date of birth.

Gloria Naylor
Black isn't beautiful and it isn't ugly — black is! It's not kinky hair and it's not straight hair — it just is.

Gloria Naylor
That's one of the privileges of old age — you can give plenty of advice 'cause most folks think that's all you got left anyway.

Gloria Naylor
You're never free from such a loss. It sits permanently in your middle, but it gets less weighty as time goes on and becomes endurable.

Gloria Naylor
She's got this real funny idea about a diet: you don't get fat if no one sees you eating.

Gloria Naylor