Ishmael Quotes

The journey itself is going to change you, so you don’t have to worry about memorizing the route we took to accomplish that change.

And every time the Takers stamp out a Leaver culture, a wisdom ultimately tested since the birth of mankind disappears from the world beyond recall.

For generations comedians have made jokes about Scots-Irish in the South inter-breeding. "I am my own grandpa" and all that stuff; you know, because they all were marrying their first cousins.

I guess when it comes to this privileged White racist feminist movement they respect someone who treats them rough: John Wayne. Frank Sinatra. Phillip Roth.

As a writer, you explore all kinds of different emotions.

I think Black intellectuals see too deeply. That's the problem. It's a cause of anxiety, because we see things differently.

Whites have been the most subsidized group in the history of the United States and maybe the history of the world, while Blacks were enslaved and were the assets of Whites.

I walked out on American Gangster: this evil piece of dreck. Defenders of this junk say that these movies give Black actors jobs. So did "Birth of a Nation."

I wasn't part of any sixties movement. I'm skeptical of movements. I'm part of the times that I'm in.

The plays raise issues that are ignored in other forums.

I think there are fundamentalists all over the world. I think all religions have fundamentalists who have different interpretations of scriptures that are very vague.

My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style.

My work holds up the mirror to hypocrisy, which puts me in a tradition of American writing that reaches back to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Americans are fickle. And what constitutes the enemy is always changing. Believe it or not, at one time Blacks were the favored model minority over Asian Americans.

I try to do what has never been done before.

Unfortunately, in the world today, we have dogmatic people entering into politics. I don't think the two mix.

My generation of writers has been prone to premature illness and death, especially the women. When Black male writers meet it's like a session of the American Diabetic Association.

I'm not against White writers writing about Blacks as long as they are as objective as say James McPherson writing about an Irish American janitor in his brilliant short story "Gold Coast."

What was once dormant is now a Creeping Thing

My novels and poems are meant to be read aloud. That's why jazz musicians have been able to adapt my stuff.

statistic: the us bureau of missing persons reports that in 1968 over 100,000 people disappeared leaving no solid clues nor traceonly a space in the lives of their friends.

Regardless of the criticisms I receive from the left, the right and the middle, I think it's important to maintain a prolific writing jab, as long as my literary legs hold up.

I get a chance to observe the moon now, I still see those same images I saw when I was six, and it pleases me to know that that part of my childhood is still embedded in me.

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.

I believe that there is a God, and coming from an African tradition, I believe also that there are gods.

How many more times do we have to come to terms with death before we find safety?

Tea Party members go to meetings on Medicare scooters.

Sometime I wonder why I walk alone on this cold, windy road. Maybe I have no one to love or no one love me at all?

We had been taken from The Wild and brought together in one place, because, for some strange reason, people found us interesting.

Dualism::In Ralph Ellison's Invisible ManI am outside of history. i wish i had some peanuts, it looks hungry there in the cage.i am outside of history. its hungrier than i thot.

The sun's brightness painted our shadows on the ground.

The old law of an eye for an eye didn’t make them blind to the fact that another man’s terrorist wasn’t their freedom fighter.

I went out and had a drink. I needed to talk to someone, and solitary drinkers are lucky in this regard— they always have someone to talk to.

To feel loved again feels good, but to know they don't love you make things worse.

[N]ow we have a clearer idea what this story is all about: The world was made for man, and man was made to rule it.

This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world's divinely appointed ruler: 'I will not LET them starve. I will not LET the drought come. I will not LET the river flood.

There is a rule in Hell: Don’t trust anyone who takes time out of their day to help you.

Children played guessing games, telling each other whether the gun fired was and AK-47, a G3, an RPG, or a machine gun.

Sometimes I closed my eyes hard to avoid thinking, but the eye of the mind refused to be closed and continued to plague me with images.

Circumstances will change and things will be fine, just hold on a little more

The world is not going to survive very much longer as humanity’s captive.

I was so happy that my mother, father, and two brothers had somehow found one another. Perhaps my mother and father have gotten back together, I thought.

Who can ever know what path to walk on when all of them are either crooked or broken? One just has to walk.

I want to be humbled. I want to meet people more messed up than I am. I want to get lost and come out the other end having no idea who I am.

The branches of the trees looked as if they were holding hands and bowing their heads in prayer.

It isn't about knowing the most stories, child. It is about carrying the ones that are most important and passing them along.

I am not an atheist preacher. I am not an absolutist or chauvinist whose ways are immune to evolution. My core philosophy is that I might be wrong.

With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?