Paule Marshall Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

It's a terrible thing to know that you gon be poor all yuh life, no matter how hard you work. You does stop trying after a time. People does see you so and call you lazy. But it ain laziness. It just that you does give up. You does kind of die inside.

Paule Marshall
Sometimes a person has to go back, really back-to have a sense, an understanding of all that's gone to make them-before they can go forward.

Paule Marshall
Once a great wrong has been done, it never dies. People speak the words of peace, but their hearts do not forgive. Generations perform ceremonies of reconciliation, but there is no end.

Paule Marshall
She died and I lived, but always, to this day even, within the shadow of her death.

Paule Marshall
I grew up among poets. Now they didn't look like poets—whatever that breed is supposed to look like. Nothing about them suggested that poetry was their calling. They were just a group of ordinary housewives and mothers, my mother included, who dressed in a way (shapeless house dresses, dowdy felt hats and long, dark, solemn coats) that made it impossible for me to imagine they had ever been young.

Paule Marshall
A person can run for years but sooner or later he has to take a stand in the place which, for better or worse, he calls home, and do what he can to change things there.

Paule Marshall
We live surrounded by white images, and white in this world is synonymous with the good, light, beauty, success, so that, despite ourselves sometimes, we run after that whiteness and deny our darkness, which has been made into the symbol of all that is evil and inferior.

Paule Marshall
I question whether I want to be integrated into America as it stands now, with its complacency and materialism, its soullessness...

Paule Marshall
They just turned, my gran' said, all of 'em and walked on back down to the edge of the river here. Every las' man, woman and chile. And they wasn't taking they time no more. They had seen what they had seen and those Ibos was stepping! And they didn't bother getting back into the small boats drawed up here—boats take too much time. They just kept walking right on out over the river.

Paule Marshall