Ishmael Quotes

...we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.

I finally had to go to the American Civil Liberties Union here in northern California to get my reply published to what I considered to be a hatchet job done by Stanley Crouch.

If you are alive, there is hope for a better day and something good to happen. If there is nothing good left in the destiny of a person, he or she will die.

The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.

In the sky there are always answers and explanations for everything: every pain, every suffering, joy and confusion.

[A]ny species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion.

Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.

No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' … That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species.

No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.

My childhood had gone by without my knowing, and it seemed as if my heart had frozen.

We must strive to be like the moon

Some nights the sky wept stars that quickly floated and disappeared into the darkness before our wishes could meet them.

My squad is my family, my gun is my provider, and protector, and my rule is to kill or be killed.

The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

I used to be a discipline problem, which caused me embarrassment until I realized that being a discipline problem in a racist society is sometimes an honor.

This is one of the consequences of the civil war. People stop trusting each other, and every stranger becomes an enemy.

One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.

You shouldn't have to settle for rabbits if what you want is deer

Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.

Living close to nature is wonderful for your mental health.

We’re destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.

I think I have a pugnacious style. My style is not pretty. I don't use words like "amber" or "opaque."

I am always quiet so that I know what to say when I must speak.

ONE OF THE UNSETTLING THINGS about my journey, mentally, physically, and emotionally, was that I wasn’t sure when or where it was going to end.

I consider racism to be a medical problem. Racists need serious medical and psychiatric help, because they are killing themselves and making others suffer along with them.

This days one must be careful to avoid awakening the pain of another.

I lay in my bed night after night staring at the ceiling and thinking, Why have I survived the war? Why was I the last person in my immediate family to be alive? I didn’t know.

I'm sure that you could go back and make a graph showing that all the killings of black males increased in times of economic difficulty. As a matter of fact, a black man was lynched last year.

There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.

The obvious can sometimes be illuminating when perceived in an unhabitual way.

My teeth became sour as I listened to his story. It was then that I understood why he was quiet all the time.

...children have the resilience to outlive their sufferings, if given a chance.

Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.

Without sounding cliché, music is like air. It provides for me. I don't necessarily look for what I can get out of it. It's a compulsion. I've always gotten out of it everything.

Multicultural is not a description of a category of American writing-it is a definition of all American writing.

Free enterprise is not a bad idea and has produced art.

In the spiritual life nowhere do our ideals meet the actual more truly than in how we relate to each other, in how we make, sustain and are friends.

Writing has made me a better man. It has put me in contact with those fleeting moments which prove the existence.

I have T.V. on all the time when I'm writing. I have music on. I'm engaged with the world.

These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past

If you can't even manage to to force your own presumably democratic governments to allow you to do good things for yourselves, then you probably deserve to become extinct.

Vanity is so superficial. It doesn't provide the grounds for progress.

A lot of great art comes from the Afro-American male experience. Black men are geniuses, and many times their desperation, their position as being pariahs, leads them to great originality.

David Simon goes to the Jewish Weekly and said he's made all this money, but he can't enjoy it because of criticism by people like Ishmael Reed.

As long as a man does not sin, he is feared. As soon as he sins, he himself is in fear.

The places I come from have such rich languages, such a variety of expression. In Sierra Leone we have about fifteen languages and three dialects. I grew up speaking about seven of them.

I was still hesitant to let myself let go, because I still believed in the fragility of happiness.

History is the story of warfare between secret societies.

If the world was made for us, then it BELONGS to us and we can do what we damn well please with it.