Gordon Parks Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

I was born to a black childhood of confusion and poverty. The memory of that beginning influences my work today, It is impossible now to photograph a hungry child without remembering the hunger of my old childhood.

Gordon Parks
Streets like the one she lived on were no accident. They were the North's lynch mobs, she thought bitterly; the method the big cities used to keep Negroes in their place.

Gordon Parks
Why does our color make such a difference?... Didn't God know that we'd have a lot of trouble if he made us black?

Gordon Parks
I feel it is the heart, not the eye, that should determine the content of the photograph. What the eye sees is its own. What the heart can perceive is a very different matter.

Gordon Parks
All life goes in a circle, around and around, you started at one place, and then came right back to it again.

Gordon Parks
If a man can reach the latter days of his life with his soul intact, he has mastered life.

Gordon Parks
The Democrats were peevishly blaming the Republicans for the state the country was in; and the Republicans were peevishly blaming the Democrats for the same thing.... This was just another case of the pot calling the kettle black; but political parties preferred to hurl the words venal and stupid at each other.

Gordon Parks
Think in terms of images and words. They can be mighty powerful when they are fitted together properly.

Gordon Parks
The snow fell softly on the street. It muffled the sound. It sent people scurrying homeward, so the street was soon deserted, empty, quiet. And it could have been any street in the city, for the snow laid a delicate film over the sidewalk, over the brick of the tired, old buildings; gently obscuring the grime and the garbage and the ugliness.

Gordon Parks
When the doors of promise open, the trick is to quickly walk through them.

Gordon Parks
Many times I wondered whether my achievement was worth the loneliness I experienced, but now I realize the price was small.

Gordon Parks
Jazz,
The meaning of it,
Is as evasive as silence.
Name one who could
Accurately define this
Passional art that slices
And churns one's senses
Into so many delicate
barbarous
And uncountable patterns.

Gordon Parks
God damn white people anyway. I don't want favors. All I want is a job. Just a job. Don't they know if I knew how I'd change the color of my skin?

Gordon Parks
She was going to stake out a piece of life for herself. She had come this far poor and black and shut out as though a door had been slammed in her face. Well, she would shove it open; she would beat and bang on it and push against it and use a chisel in order to get it open.

Gordon Parks