Blackness Quotes - Page 3

• There are stars, stars, scattered stars, blackness all between. They ripple and fold and bend, and they rush toward him, rush by him. Their colors are blazing and pure as angels' eyes.

  Roger Zelazny

  Stars, Eye, Angel

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• Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time.

  Banana Yoshimoto

  Failing, Someday, Disappear

  Banana Yoshimoto, Megan Backus (1979). “Three Plays”, p.21, Grove Press

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• That pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere ... the firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage-scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Happiness, Lying, Reality

  Nathaniel Hawthorne (2015). “Complete Novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated Edition): Fanshawe, The Scarlet Letter with its Adaptation, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, The Marble Faun, The Dolliver Romance, Septimius Felton, Grimshawe's Secret and Biography”, p.804, e-artnow

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• Part of writing a novel is being willing to leap into the blackness. You have very little idea, really, of what's going to happen. You have a broad sense, maybe, but it's this rash leap. It's like spelunking. You kind of create the right path for yourself. But, boy, are there so many points at which you think, absolutely, I'm going down the wrong hole here. And I can't get back to the right hole. I'm not going to be able to get this section back to the right hole - so I'm just going to have to cut it.

  Chang-Rae Lee

  Writing, Cutting, Boys

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• Part of what I am dealing with, with this blackness, is asking the question, "Where are those black people, who are as dark as the description of a young black boy that Solomon Northup gives in 12 Years A Slave?" He describes the young black 14-year-old boy as "blacker than any crow." You have to question if he is using that metaphorically or as a descriptive?

  Kerry James Marshall

  Dark, Boys, Years

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The brain "fills in" the missing information from the blind spot. Notice what you see in the location of the dot when it's in your blind spot. When the dot disappears, you do not perceive a hole of whiteness or blackness in its place; instead your brain invents a patch of the background pattern. Your brain, with no information from that particular spot in visual space, fills in with the patterns around it. You're not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.

  David Eagleman

  Blind Spots, Space, Missing

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• No one knows how greatness comes to a man. It may lie in his blackness, sleeping, or it may lance into him like those driven fiery particles from outer space. These things, however, are known about greatness: need gives it life and puts it in action; it never comes without pain; it leaves a man changed, chastened, and exalted at the same time--he can never return to simplicity.

  John Steinbeck

  Pain, Lying, Sleep

  John Steinbeck (2008). “Sweet Thursday”, p.316, Penguin

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• I'm just challenging white supremacy at its intellectual heart every day. It's a pedagogy that I deploy against some of the most vicious resistance to blackness that whiteness is able to throw up. I engage in a lot of intellectual combat with supremacists and with the predicate of white supremacy and white indifference to black identity, and brown and red and yellow identity too, for that matter.

  Michael Eric Dyson

  Heart, Yellow, White

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Where some may see flat, static narratives, I see a spectrum of tonal gradations and realities. What I am creating is literally black portraiture with ballpoint pen ink. I'm looking for that in-between state in an individual where the overarching definition is lost. Skin as geography is the terrain I expand by emphasizing the specificity of blackness, where an individual’s subjectivity, various realities and experiences can be drawn onto the diverse topography of the epidermis. From there, the possibilities of portraying a fully-fledged person are endless.

  Toyin Odutola

  Reality, Creating, Black

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• There is fascism, leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders, and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty - in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub - our immediate duty is to stop it.

  E. M. Forster

  War, Mean, Self

  "Notes on the Way". Time and Tide Magazine, June 10, 1934.

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• The breezes of the West African night were intimate and shy, licking the hair, sweeping through cotton dresses with unseemly intimacy, then disappearing into the utter blackness.

  Maya Angelou

  Night, Hair, Dresses

  Maya Angelou (2010). “All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes”, p.3, Vintage

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• Sky of blackness and sorrow, sky of love, sky of tears. Sky of glory and sadness, sky of mercy, sky of fear.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Sadness, Sky, Sorrow

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• The raven once in snowy plumes was drest,
  White as the whitest dove's unsullied breast,
  Fair as the guardian of the Capitol,
  Soft as the swan; a large and lovely fowl
  His tongue, his prating tongue had changed him quite
  To sooty blackness from the purest white.

  Ovid

  Ravens, White, Swans

  Ovid (1833). “Ovid”, p.56

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• Ageism is the racism of the gay world. We really believe that age-and all of our fears that it carries-will "rub off" on us, the way that racists once believed blackness would.

  Perry Brass

  Believe, Gay, Racism

  Perry Brass (1998). “The Lover of My Soul: A Search for Ecstasy and Wisdom”, p.30, Perry Brass

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• Whereas your blackness, ethnicity, homosexuality is something that might be genetic, I can't touch that, and I have no right.

  George Carlin

  Ethnicity, Might, Homosexuality

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• It doesn't surprise me that aspect of the black nationalist movement, the cultural side, has triumphed because that is the aspect of the movement that was most commodifiable and when we look at the commodification of blackness we're looking at a phenomenon that's very profitable and it's connection with the rise of a black middle class I think is very obvious.

  Angela Davis

  Thinking, Class, Black

  Frontline Interview, www.pbs.org. 1997.

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• The world was held in a savage gloom - cold and intolerable. Outside, all was quiet - quiet! From the dark room behind me, came the occasional, soft thud of falling matter - fragments of rotting stone. So time passed, and night grasped the world, wrapping it in wrappings of impenetrable blackness.

  William Hope Hodgson

  Fall, Dark, Night

  William Hope Hodgson (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of William Hope Hodgson (Illustrated)”, p.218, Delphi Classics

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• The writer should always serve as his own angleworm —and the sharper the barb with which he fishes himself out of blackness, the better.

  John Hawkes

  Should, Fishes, Barbs

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• For the first time, we saw our world, not as a solid, immovable, kind of indestructible place, but as a very small, fragile-looking world just hanging against the blackness of space.

  Brian Cox

  Motivation, Inspiration, Our World

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• There's a fount about to stream, There's a light about to beam, There's a warmth about to glow, There's a flower about to blow; There's a midnight blackness changing Into gray; Men of thought and men of action, Clear the way.

  Charles Mackay

  Flower, Blow, Men

  Charles Mackay (1859). “Ballads and Lyrics”

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• I'm not talking about my children's father'he's a wonderful black man, the hero of my life, and he's never disrespected or betrayed me. But I'm talking about what I see in the streets and in the media, this naked hatred that black men have towards the authentic black woman'which is really an indication of black men's hatred for blackness itself.

  Kola Boof

  Children, Father, Hero

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• When everything that is called art was well and truly riddled with rheumatism, the photographer lit the thousands of candles whose power is contained in his flame, and the sensitive paper absorbed by degrees the blackness cut out of some ordinary object. He had invented a fresh and tender flash of lightning.

  Tristan Tzara

  Art, Cutting, Flames

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• We're not troubled at all, but I think...Well, we're Scandinavians! We're Vikings and we have a lot of blackness in our souls.

  Nina Persson

  Thinking, Soul, Vikings

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• I also found it funny to think about blackness as the second person. That was just sort of funny. Not the first person, but the second person, the other person.

  Claudia Rankine

  Thinking, Firsts, Found

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Being a black artist, the first thing people want to talk about is your blackness, the importance of your blackness and your black presence.

  Toyin Odutola

  Artist, People, Black

  "'The Moment for Ink': Show frees artist". Interview with Kimberly Chun, www.sfgate.com. March 22, 2013.

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