Black Authors Quotes

“It is strange to both fit in everywhere and belong nowhere, to never feel completely at home outside of your own skin”
― Maquita Donyel Irvin, Stories of a Polished Pistil: Unpaved

“Joy situates every emotion within itself. It grounds them so that one isn’t overindulged while the others lie starving. Joy doesn’t replace any emotion; it holds them all and keeps them from swallowing us whole. Society has failed to understand this. When it tells us to find joy in suffering, it is telling us to let it go, to move on, to smile through it. But joy says, Hold on to your sorrow. It can rest safely here.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“What is the worth of a woman plagued by sadness?
When people demand joy always, it makes the world seem incompatible with those of us whose happiest days are still anguished. In this way, joy was one of my earliest alienators.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“You may think we are called to holy things that involve praying on your knees and going to church, and maybe we are.
But I haven't known God to regulate holiness. I think they injected it into every bit of everything. And I imagine they are very concerned with every element of life, including our work.
And why wouldn't they be?”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“The fear of course is that in denying or refusing complicity in the marginalization of 'black' writers, I ended up on the very distant and very 'other' side of a line that is imaginary at best. I didn't write as an act of testimony or social indignation (though all writing in some way is just that) and I did not write out of a so-called family tradition of oral storytelling. I never tried to set anybody free, never tried to paint the next real and true picture of the life of my people, never had any people whose picture I knew well enough to paint. Perhaps if I had written in the time immediately following Reconstruction, I would have written to elevate the station of my fellow oppressed.
But the irony was beautiful. I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression. So, I would not be economically oppressed because of writing a book that fell in line with the very books I deemed racist. And I would have to wear the mask of the person I was expected to be.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“To be a human who resembles the divine is to become responsible for the beautiful, for its observance, its protection, and its creation. It is a challenge to believe that this right is ours.
Wonder, then, is a force of liberation. It makes sense of what our souls inherently know we were meant for. Every mundane glimpse is salve on a wound, instructions for how to set the bone right again. If you really want to get free, find God on the subway. Find God in the soap bubble.
Me? I meet God in the taste of my gramma's chicken. I hear God in the raspy leather of Nina Simone's voice. I see the face of God in the bony teenager bagging my groceries. And why shouldn't I? My faith is held together by wonder—by every defiant commitment to presence and paying attention. I cannot tell you with precision what makes the sun set, but I can tell you how those colors, blurred together, calm my head and change my breath. I will die knowing I lived a faith that changed my breathing. A faith that made me believe I could see air.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“Collective memory requires that we piece together the fragments of individual memory and behold something not necessarily larger but with greater depth and colour. I think the whole Bible is predicated on collective remembrance. You have feast and fast days, storytelling, and most conspicuously, the Eucharist. A shared table and a shared loaf. Take, eat, drink. The Christian story hinges on a ceremony of communal remembrance. This should train us toward an embodied memory. My hand on a ballet barre, and every muscle knows how to come awake again. My father takes up my detangled hair in his hands, and his fingers dip and twist so fast they blur and become one. Do this in remembrance of me.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“Some theologies say it is not an individual but a collective people who bear the image of God. I quite like this, because it means we need a diversity of people to reflect God more fully.
Anything less and the image becomes pixelated and grainy, still beautiful but lacking clarity. If God really is three parts in one like they say, it means that God's wholeness is in a multitude.
I do not know if God meant to confer value on us by creating us in their own image, but they had to have known it would at least be one outcome. How can anyone who is made to bear likeness to the maker of the cosmos be anything less than glory? This is inherent dignity.
I do find it peculiar that humans have come to wield this over the rest of creation as though we are somehow superior. I don't believe this to be the case. Sometimes I wonder if we knelt down and put our ear to the ground, it would whisper up to us, Yes, you were made in the image of God, but God made you of me. We've grown numb to the idea that we ourselves are made of the dust, mysteriously connected to the goodness of the creation that surrounds us.
Perhaps the more superior we believe ourselves to be to creation, the less like God we become. But if we embrace shalom—the idea that everything is suspended in a delicate balance between the atoms that make me and the tree and the bird and the sky—if we embrace the beauty of all creation, we find our own beauty magnified. And what is shalom but dignity stretched out like a blanket over the cosmos?”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“How will we make space to hold the memory of the collective? There are times when belonging is not cemented in the lived moment of an experience but in the lively or sombre retelling of the moment afterward. Which means we can transfer belonging to the next generation by welcoming them into memories that they (or we) have not lived but choose to steward. In many spaces, to foster collective memory well, we must habitually ask ourselves, Whose story gets told, whose story is believed, and who gets to tell it? If we surrender our individual egos, these questions can function as a pruning process, as we contend with accounts that don’t line up quite flush. This interrogation may reveal false memories.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“Sometimes, it is only in the hands of another that a memory can be fully encountered. All of a sudden it is not the front of the car you see but the street from the back side window. The memory expands past two dimensions. This is the beauty of collective memory.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“I once heard that joy and happiness do different things to the body. Happiness, which works itself out in the sympathetic nervous system, makes you excitable and energetic. It's important but fleeting, grounded in the immediacy of a moment or the whim of a feeling. Joy is more tranquil. It has to do with the parasympathetic nervous system, and it's much more about peace than vibrancy.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“Liberation loves company. It is not threatened by another person's identity, because liberation is not a scarcity. It can only affirm itself in another person.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“Memory is frail. It requires a delicate touch, a tenderness.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“I once heard the activist John Perkins say, “You don’t give dignity, you affirm it.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“When we grow accustomed to neglecting beauty, we eventually become creatures of hatred. We lose? our imagination—a virtue to which wonder is helplessly tied.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“If you are always spending a dollar here and a dollar there, you will never have enough dollars to invest and share.”
― Linsey Mills, Currency of Conversations: The Talk You've Been Waiting For About Money

“Retirement is when your financial statement says: Relax I’ll take it from here.”
― Linsey Mills, Currency of Conversations: The Talk You've Been Waiting For About Money

“Black History does not originate in colonization or apartheid era when Blacks were slaves.....Black history originate before colonization..in the beginning of Creation, when Black's were Kings, Queens, Rulers, Leaders, Innovators, Creators, gods and Pharaohs." Dr Lloyd Magangeni”
― Dr Lloyd Magangeni, The Uncommon Strategist

“Black History does not originate in colonization or apartheid era when Blacks were slaves.....Black history originate before colonization..in the beginning of Creation, when Blacks were Kings, Queens, Rulers, Leaders, Innovators, Creators, gods and Pharaohs." Dr Lloyd Magangeni”
― Dr Lloyd Magangeni, The Uncommon Strategist

“Children are like sponges, absorbing their parents' attitudes and behaviors towards money. It's crucial for parents to be mindful of their financial actions and lead by example.”
― Linsey Mills, Currency of Conversations: The Talk You've Been Waiting For About Money

“When parents openly communicate about money matters, they empower their children to develop a healthy understanding of financial concepts, fostering a positive relationship with money.”
― Linsey Mills, Teach Your Child About Money Through Play: 110+ Games/Activities, Tips, and Resources to Teach Kids Financial Literacy at an Early Age

“Children observe their parents' reactions during financial challenges. By demonstrating resilience, adaptability, and resourcefulness, parents can inspire their children to overcome financial obstacles with confidence.”
― Linsey Mills, Currency of Conversations: The Talk You've Been Waiting For About Money

“By instilling a sense of delayed gratification in their children, parents can teach them the importance of patience and long-term financial planning, preparing them for a prosperous future.”
― Linsey Mills, Currency of Conversations: The Talk You've Been Waiting For About Money

“For minorities and marginalized groups, representation matters, but access matters more.”
― Raven Jemison, More Than Representation: The Cheat Codes to Own Your Seat at the Table

“But just like her, the boy was ice cold and closed off from the world.”
― Emir Darlov, London Heights & Angelo: A play by Emir Darlov

“I pitied her, because she was all alone in a world full of people fixated on her, and that must be the loneliest place on Earth to be.”
― Emir Darlov, It's Just The Two Of Us Now: An Emir’s Oasis play by Emir Darlov

“The greatest act of revolution for any black woman is to put pen to paper with purpose.”
― Stalina Goodwin, Daughters of Zora: Affirmations for Black Women Writers

“You're a wave and a particle simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in my thoughts, collapsing into form only when I try to measure your feelings”
― Asha Walker, Limerence

“Practicing mindfulness can seem abstract at first. It certainly was to me. But what I’ve learned is that when we use the senses we have available, we create a shortcut to present-centered living. Because the body naturally rests in the here-and-now, it proves itself a useful tool in mindfulness.”
― Jor-El Caraballo, Meditations for Black Men: Ten Guided Meditations for the Body, Mind, and Spirit

“Black lives should not only matter when we are dead. We should matter while we are living.”
― Ahavel Aborishade