I was chastised for writing several obituaries for Malcolm X, exploring different aspects of his writing. One teacher in particular told me, didn’t I think I was beating a dead horse? and dismissively threw my paper on my desk. Ntozake Shange Read Quote
I remember that my mother used to take me to see ballets, especially if there were black people in them. Ntozake Shange Read Quote
White people use their literature to maintain culture. That’s why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels. Ntozake Shange Read Quote
I write for young girls of color, for girls who don’t even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive. I can only change how they live, not how they think. Ntozake Shange Read Quote
My characters don’t talk necessarily in a normal American way of talking. They talk a little different. Ntozake Shange Read Quote
There was quite a ruckus about the seven ladies in their simple colored dresses. I was truly dumbfounded that I was, right then and there, deemed the biggest threat to black men since cotton pickin’, and not all women were in my corner, either. Ntozake Shange Read Quote
There was nothing to aspire to, no one to honor. Sojourner Truth wasn’t a big enough role model for me. I couldn’t go around abolishing slavery. Ntozake Shange Read Quote
I never intended to go to Broadway. I was very happy being in an Off Broadway theater and having an Off Broadway life. What it did to me is try to fit a round peg – that’s me – into a whole bunch of square buildings. I just didn’t fit. Ntozake Shange Read Quote
Art gives us the opportunity to have clarity as well as hope that we might be able to survive a situation, or hope that we can find a way out of it without too much more injury to ourselves. Ntozake Shange Read Quote
When I die, I will not be guilty of having left a generation of girls behind thinking that anyone can tend to their emotional health other than themselves. Ntozake Shange Read Quote
