~Quotable!~ Morgan Freeman

An American actor, producer, and narrator, Freeman won an Academy Award in 2005 for Best Supporting Actor with Million Dollar Baby (2004), He has received Oscar nominations for his performances in Street Smart (1987), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and Invictus (2009). He has also won a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award. He got his break as part of the cast of the 1970s children’s program The Electric Company.
Morgan Freeman is ranked as the 3rd highest box office star with over $4.316 billion total box office gross, an average of $74.4 million per film. Image from Google.

“You’re going to relegate my history to a month.”

“I don’t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.”

“When I was a teenager, I began to settle into school because I’d discovered the extracurricular activities that interested me: music and theater.”

“The best way to guarantee a loss is to quit.”

“Learning how to be still, to really be still and let life happen – that stillness becomes a radiance.”

Quotable! – Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead is a New York-based novelist. He is the author of six novels, including his debut work, the 1999 novel The Intuitionist, and the National Book Award-winning novel The Underground Railroad. Image from Princeton.

“What isn’t said is as important as what is said.”

“Write what you know.”

“I’m just trying to keep things rich for me creatively and for the readers who follow me.”

“Early in my career, I figured out that I just have to write the book I have to write at that moment. Whatever else is going on in the culture is just not that important. If you could get the culture to write your book, that would be great. But the culture can’t write your book.”

~ Quote ~

James Baldwin Quote

Quotable! – Nikki Giovanni

Yolande Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni, Jr. – poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. Image from Feminine Fusion.

“Nothing is easy to the unwilling.”

“Everything will change. The only question is growing up or decaying.”

“We love because it’s the only true adventure.”

“Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts.”

“If you don’t understand yourself you don’t understand anybody else.”

“show me someone not full of herself and I’ll show you a hungry person.”

Quotable! – August Wilson

August Wilson – (1945-2005) two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences, The Piano Lesson, King Hedley II, Ma Rainy’s Black Bottom, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Seven Guitars, Two Trains Running, Jitney and Radio Golf. Image from the Boston Globe.

“You can put law on paper but that don’t make it right.”

“You got to be right with yourself before you can be right with anybody else.”

“My early attempts writing plays, which are very poetic, did not use the language that I work in now. I didn’t recognize the poetry in everyday language of black America. I thought I had to change it to create art.”

“Have a belief in yourself that is bigger than anyone’s disbelief.”

“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.”

Quotable! – W.E.B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois (1868-1963) sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, editor, and author. Image from AAIHS.

“A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills.”

“The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.”

“To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”

Quotable! – Octavia E. Butler

Octavia E. Butler, (1947-2006) award-winning science fiction author of Kindred, Dawn, Patternmaster and the Parable Series. Image from Stagen Studios.

“Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyze yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.”

“I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.”

“People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn’t bother me. It’s other people doing the calling that bothers me.”

Quotable – Ernest J. Gaines

Ernest Gaines, author of A Lesson Before Dying, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and A Gathering of Old Men. Image from Google

“I want you to show them the difference between what they think you are and what you can be.”

“Nietzsche said without music, life would be a mistake. To me, without books, life would be a mistake.”

“I believe that the writer should tell a story. I believe in plot. I believe in creating characters and suspense.”

Quotable – Wole Soyinka

Akinwande Oluwole “Wole” Babatunde Soyinka, (Nigerian writer, poet, and playwright) Image from NAIJ.com

“Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.”

“The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.”

“The hand that dips into the bottom of the pot will eat the biggest snail.”

“Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.”

“And I believe that the best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of others.”

“The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.”

Quotable – Toni Morrison

                                           Toni Morrison
                   (African-American novelist and professor)
                                Image from Pinterest