Raymond > Raymond's Quotes

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“The opposition to Negro education in the South was at first bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
― Frederick Douglass

“[D]on't ever apologise to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that's what they're there for. Use your library). Don't apologise to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend's copy. What's important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read...”
― Neil Gaiman

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“We should live our lives as though Christ was coming this afternoon.”
― Jimmy Carter

“History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. —JAMES BALDWIN”
― Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“Joyce is right about history being a nightmare—but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“the betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“Live so that the world will need you,
Daily tread the path of light,
Keep a bag of sunshine with you,
Be a jewel pure and bright.”
― Carrie Law Morgan Figgs, Poetic Pearls

“This world is a great busy thoroughfare,
To succeed you must elbow your way,
If you wait for success to come to you,
You'll wait there and die in dismay.”
― Carrie Law Morgan Figgs, Poetic Pearls

“Jim Crow wasn't nothing but slavery, wrapped up in a nice little gift card." -Rev. John Kennard”
― Jaha Nailah Avery, Those Who Saw the Sun: African American Oral Histories from the Jim Crow South

“The act of writing is a way to create another world in language, a dwelling place for the psyche wherein the chaos of the external world is transformed, shaped into a made thing, and ordered. It is an act of reclamation. And resistance: the soul sings for justice and the song is poetry.”
― Natasha Trethewey, The House of Being

“To have dominion over oneself, to be the sovereign of the nation of the self, one must be the writer of the story.”
― Natasha Trethewey, The House of Being

“Writing is a way of creating order out of chaos, of taking charge of one's own story, being the sovereign of the self by pushing back against received knowledge and guarding the sanctity of the dwelling place of the imagination, that place of first permission.”
― Natasha Trethewey, The House of Being

“I know now that if we choose to keep any part of what is behind us, we must take all of it, hold each moment up to the light like a photograph.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Bellocq's Ophelia

“The pain of what happened next lives in our collective memory. It mauls our souls each day. Yet it must be told. Silence guarantees no healing. It promises that the child's life would be forgotten and that its mission might, one day, be thought significant. Silence is the enemy of history, and history is all we have.”
― Daniel Black, The Coming