Toni Cade Bambara Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

The dream is real, my friends. The failure to realize it is the only unreality.

Toni Cade Bambara
I'll be damned if I want most folks out there to do unto me what they do unto themselves.

Toni Cade Bambara
When you dream, you dialogue with aspects of yourself that normally are not with you in the daytime and you discover that you know a great deal more than you thought you did.

Toni Cade Bambara
His body's taken on the weight his mind still refuses to accept.

Toni Cade Bambara
Not all wars have casualties.... Some struggles between old and new ideas, some battles between ways of seeing have only victors. Not all dying is the physical self.

Toni Cade Bambara
If you say Gorilla, My Love you suppose to mean it. Just like when you say you goin to give me a party on my birthday, you gotta mean it.... I mean even gangsters in the movies say My word is my bond. So don't nobody get away with nothing far as I'm concerned.

Toni Cade Bambara
Where we are is who we are, Miss Moore always pointin out. But it don't necessarily have to be that way, she always adds then waits for somebody to say that poor people have to wake up and demand their share of the pie and don't none of us know what kind of pie she talkin about in the first damn place.

Toni Cade Bambara
We are involved in a struggle for liberation: liberation from the exploitive and dehumanizing system of racism, from the manipulative control of a corporate society; liberation from the constrictive norms of "mainstream" culture, from the synthetic myths that encourage us to fashion ourselves rashly from without (reaction) rather than from within (creation).

Toni Cade Bambara
The story is a piece of work. The novel is a way of life.

Toni Cade Bambara
People have to be given permission to write, and they have to be given space to breathe and stumble. They have to be given time to develop and to reveal what they can do.

Toni Cade Bambara
What is religion, you might ask. It's a technology of living.

Toni Cade Bambara
That is what I work to do: to produce stories that save our lives.

Toni Cade Bambara
What is happening to the daughters of the yam? Seem like they just don't know how to draw up the powers from the deep like before. Not full sunned and sweet anymore.

Toni Cade Bambara
When we ever invited the beast to dinner he didn't come in and swipe the napkins and start taking notes on the tablecloth 'bout how to take over the whole house?

Toni Cade Bambara
She [my mother] gave me permission to wonder, to dawdle, to daydream.

Toni Cade Bambara
For people sometimes believed that it was safer to live with complaints, was necessary to cooperate with grief, was all right to become an accomplice in self-ambush.... Take heart to flat out decide to be well and stride into the future sane and whole.

Toni Cade Bambara
Take away the miseries and you take away some folks' reason for living.

Toni Cade Bambara
All writers, musicians, artists, choreographers/dancers, etc., work with the stuff of their experiences. It's the translation of it, the conversion of it, the shaping of it that makes for the drama.

Toni Cade Bambara
The only proper mask to wear in life is your own damned face.

Toni Cade Bambara
One monkey don't stop no show. Not one, not six. The struggle continues.

Toni Cade Bambara
There are times... when any visitor — in person, by phone, by mail — is an intruder, a burglar, a space hogger, an oxygen taker, a chaos maker, a conflict inducer, a mood chaser, and a total drag.

Toni Cade Bambara
We stand there with this big smile of respect between us. It's about as real a smile as girls can do for each other, considering we don't practice real smiling every day, you know, cause maybe we too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect... like being people.

Toni Cade Bambara
First and foremost I write for myself. Writing has been for a long time my major tool for self-instruction and self-development.

Toni Cade Bambara
Wasn't that what happened to Lot's Wife? A loyalty to old things, a fear of the new, a fear to change, to look ahead?

Toni Cade Bambara
Read a lot and hit the streets. A writer who doesn't keep up with what's out there ain't gonna be out there.

Toni Cade Bambara
Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion. I've seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges.

Toni Cade Bambara
She never wanted these pictures called up on some future hot, dry day in some other place. She squinted, closed her eyes even, 'less the pictures cling to her eyes, store in the brain, to roll out later and crush her future with the weight of this place and its troubles.

Toni Cade Bambara
What can defeat greed, technological superiority, and legal lawlessness... is discipline, consciousness, and unity.

Toni Cade Bambara