Larry Neal Quotes

5 Sourced Quotes

We are beautiful—but there is more work to do, and just being beautiful is not enough.

Larry Neal

The Black Arts Movement believes that your ethics and your aesthetics are one. That the contradictions between ethics and aesthetics in Western society is symptomatic of a dying culture.

Larry Neal

I remember the faces
the soft and the hard
faces scarred, wailing
for the song and the moan
digging the gardenia thing
she was into.

Larry Neal

Remember me baby in my best light,
lovely and hip style and all;
all laid out in my green velour
stashing on corners
in my boxcar coat—
so sure of myself, too cool for words,
and running down a beautiful game.

Larry Neal

Our nightmares are tight compacted
whitenesses, smotherings of babies,
jammed into drunken limits.
our souls are open skies and children
zooming across green places;
sea-shell prisons; are things heard
in between tropical blasts of wind;
are ancestor-wisdom making itself
known in every black face born or about to be.

Larry Neal