John Edgar Wideman Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

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.

John Edgar Wideman
When it's played the way is spozed to be played, basketball happens in the air, the pure air; flying, floating, elevated above the floor, levitating the way oppressed peoples of this earth imagine themselves in their dreams.

John Edgar Wideman
Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.

John Edgar Wideman
"All stories are true" suggests a kind of ultimate democracy—it also suggests a kind of chaos.

John Edgar Wideman
Truth becomes a function of the choral nature of the exchanges. Stories are told over time, and so they naturally accrue meanings.

John Edgar Wideman
In Haiti, as I understand it, storytelling and history itself are not a business of necessarily elucidating facts or the truth of an incident, but finding the version that is most entertaining and therefore will get retold and live in immortality.

John Edgar Wideman
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 what the hell was going on. I had solitary instincts when I was very young, and reading was a way to make that time a little more entertaining.

John Edgar Wideman
Tell me, finally, what is a man. What is a woman. Aren't we lovers first, spirits sharing an uncharted space, a space our stories tell, a space chanted, written upon again and again, yet one story never quite erased by the next, each story saving the space, saving itself, saving us. If someone is listening.

John Edgar Wideman
They're killing us faster now. And beating down the ones they can't kill. Our boys over there supposed to be dying equal. It's a crying shame how they do us.

John Edgar Wideman
Teach me who I might be, who you might be—without it [race].

John Edgar Wideman
The stories must be told. Ideas of manhood, true and transforming, grow out of private, personal exchanges between fathers and sons. Yet for generations of black men in America this privacy, this privilege has been systematically breached in a most shameful and public way. Not only breached, but brutally usurped, mediated by murder, mayhem, misinformation.

John Edgar Wideman
What should open now in response to the tragedy of a city burning is the vista of your heart. But you run away every time. You'll turn your back every time. Philadelphia's on fire.

John Edgar Wideman
Brother could be in both places at once. A Brother in the sky. A Brother humping down Finance Street. In one place he had no color, he could not speak or play. In another place he watches and waits.

John Edgar Wideman
I still can't believe it. Eleven people murdered. Babies, women, didn't make no nevermind to the cops. Eleven human beings dead for what? Tell me for what. Why did they have to kill my brothers and sisters? Burn them up like you burn garbage?

John Edgar Wideman
I imagine my mother dreaming the streets and her dreams are what happens in the streets below, the way she used to dream me home safely by sitting up and waiting for me to stumble in, no matter how late the hour.

John Edgar Wideman
Stories are letters. Letters sent to anybody or everybody. But the best kind are meant to be read by a specific somebody. When you read that kind you know you are eavesdropping.

John Edgar Wideman