Your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel.
August WilsonRead
Blacks in America want to forget about slavery - the stigma, the shame. If you can't be who you are, who can you be? How can you know what to do? We have our history. We have our book, and that is the blues.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of acknowledging and embracing one's history to understand identity and purpose.
August Wilson's quote reflects the struggle of African Americans to reconcile with the legacy of slavery and its societal implications. He suggests that forgetting this painful history stifles identity and inhibits the ability to know oneself and one's path forward. By recognizing their past, embodied in the expression of the blues, individuals can find strength and authenticity in who they are.
In practice
In a speech about cultural identity at a community event.
Your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel.
I think the blues is the best literature that we as blacks have created since we've been here. I call it our 'sacred book.' What I've attempted to do is to mine that field, to mine those cultural ideas and attitudes and give them to my characters.
All you need in the world is love and laughter. That's all anybody needs. To have love in one hand and laughter in the other.
I do - very specifically, I remember Bessie Smith; I used to collect 78 records that I would buy from the St Vincent de Paul store at five cents apiece, and I did this indiscriminately. I would just take whatever was there. And I listened to Patti Page and Walter Huston, 'September Song.'
I know some things when I start. I know, let's say, that the play is going to be a 1970s or a 1930s play, and it's going to be about a piano, but that's it. I slowly discover who the characters are as I go along.
When I first started writing plays I couldn't write good dialogue because I didn't respect how black people talked. I thought that in order to make art out of their dialogue I had to change it, make it into something different. Once I learned to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I let them start talking.
To have arrived on this earth as a product of a biological accident, only to depart through human arrogance, would be the ultimate irony.
Prayer is not a preparation for the battle; it is the battle!
Most of us are frightened of dying because we don't know what it meant to live.We don't know how to live,therefore we don't know how to die
Truth is, I've always been selling out. The difference is that in the past, I looked like I had integrity because there were no buyers.
Sufre mas el que espera siempre que aquel que nunca espero a nadie? Does he who is always waiting suffer more than he who’s never waited for anyone?
All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.
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