Blanche Among the Talented Tenth Quotes

“Love and sex, honey. Either one can make you do the damndest things. The two combined will make you a sure ’nough fool.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Among the Talented Tenth

“Anytime you get this many light-skinned black people together at least half of them are going to be folks who act light-skinned.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Among the Talented Tenth

“She wondered how soon after the first baby was born of the rape of a black woman by a white man did some slaver decide that light-skinned slaves were smarter and better by virtue of white blood? And how long after that had some black people decided to take advantage of that myth?”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Among the Talented Tenth

“The longer I live, the more boring youth becomes. So redundant. Each generation rediscovers the wheel of rebellion, the wheel of love, and so forth and so on. We hardly know which end is up until we’re in our thirties.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Among the Talented Tenth

“The morning sunlight lay in slivers on the bedroom floor, cut to ribbons by the bamboo blind.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Among the Talented Tenth

“Today’s national movements, women’s and blacks’, seem more interested in being players in the white male club than challenging the white male patriarchy.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Among the Talented Tenth

“Sometimes it’s hard being dark-skinned, just like it’s sometimes hard to be any shade of brown or yellow. But it’s not awful. We’re just as cute and wonderful as anyone else.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Among the Talented Tenth

“She’d once asked a black psychologist whose house she’d cleaned on Long Island about black people’s attachment to clothes. She’d told Blanche it probably was partly due to African peoples’ belief in body adornment in a spiritual way, and partly because, consciously or unconsciously, black people in America hoped clothes would make them acceptable to people who hated them no matter what they wore.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche Among the Talented Tenth