Quotes on Black

[On his heroin addiction:] I did it to myself. It wasn't society...it wasn't a pusher, it wasn't being blind or being black or being poor. It was all my doing.

White shall not neutralize the black, nor good compensate bad in man, absolve him so; life's business being just the terrible choice.

As a young black boy, it made me proud to see black leaders that did something amazing and made the world change.

I'd like to state that Spike Lee is not saying that African American culture is just for black people alone to enjoy and cherish. Culture is for everybody.

I always give the example, if you turn on the radio today, black radio, Lenny Kravitz is not black. Bob Marley wasn't black: in the beginning, only white college stations played Bob Marley.

Adventure is a path. Real adventure - self-determined, self-motivated, often risky - forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind - and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.

Man cannot call the brimming instant back;_x000D_ _x000D_ Time's an affair of instants spun to days;_x000D_ _x000D_ If man must make an instant gold, or black,_x000D_ _x000D_ Let him, he may; but Time must go his ways._x000D_ _x000D_ Life may be duller for an instant's blaze._x000D_ _x000D_ Life's an affair of instants spun to years,_x000D_ _x000D_ Instants are only cause of all these tears.

There's no way I can represent for everyone. I can't represent for all women or all big women or all black women. It's important for people not to make celebrities their source of who they should be in life. I can't take on the pressure of being perfect. Nobody is.

My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

Look, the world's comforter, with weary gait,_x000D_ _x000D_ His day's hot task hath ended in the west:_x000D_ _x000D_ The owl, night's herald, shrieks-'tis very late;_x000D_ _x000D_ The sheep are gone to fold, birds to their nest;_x000D_ _x000D_ And coal-black clouds, that shadow heaven's light,_x000D_ _x000D_ Do summon us to part, and bid good night.

Leaving out the gamblers, the burglars, and the plumbers, perhaps we do put our trust in God after a fashion. But, after all, it is an overstatement. If the cholera or black plague should come to these shores, perhaps the bulk of the nation would pray to be delivered from it, but the rest would put their trust in The Health Board.

I believe that it would be almost impossible to find anywhere in America a black man who has lived further down in the mud of human society than I have; or a black man who has been any more ignorant than I have; or a black man who has suffered more anguish during his life than I have. But it is only after the deepest darkness that the greatest joy can come; it is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise. I rise. I rise.

Nae man can tether time or tide; The hour approachesTam maun ride; That hour, o'night's black arch the key-stane, That dreary hourTam mounts his beast in.

Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.

The snow drifted down and down, all in ghostly silence, and lay thick and unbroken on the ground. It was a place of whites and blacks and greys. White towers and white snow and white statues, black shadows and black trees, the dark grey sky above. A pure world, Sansa thought. I do not belong here. Yet she stepped out all the same.

But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.

The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.

Suddenly it wasn't only a personal thing to me. I could picture hundreds and hundreds of boys living on the wrong sides of cities, boys with black eyes who jumped at their own shadows. Hundreds of boys who maybe watched sunsets and looked at stars and ached for something better. I could see boys going down under street lights because they were mean and tough and hated the world, and it was too late to tell them that there was still good in it, and they wouldn't believe you if you did.

Sam, clinging to Frodo's arm, collapsed on a step in the black darkness. 'Poor old Bill!' he said in a choking voice. 'Poor old Bill! Wolves and snakes! But the snakes were too much for him. I had to choose, Mr. Frodo. I had to come with you.

In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question.