Margaret Walker quotes:

My grandmothers are full of memories, smelling of soap and onions and wet clay, with veins rolling roughly over quick hands, they have many clean words to say, my grandmothers were strong.

Friends and good manners will carry you where money won't go.

I want my careless song to strike no minor key; no fiend to stand between my body's Southern song - the fusion of the South, my body's song and me.

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.

Old Molly Means was a hag and a witch; Chile of the devil, the dark, and sitch.

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth.

Snow-white moslem head-dress around a dead black face! Beautiful were your sand-papering words against our skins!

Her voice is thin and her moan is high, And her cackling laugh or her barking cold Bring terror to the young and old. O Molly, Molly, Molly Means Lean is the ghost of Molly Means.

The Word of fire burns today On the lips of our prophets in an evil age.

When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.

Now when you hates you shrinks up inside and gets littler and you squeezes your heart tight and you stays so mad with peoples you feels sick all the time like you needs the doctor.

Racism is so extreme and so pervasive in our American society that no black individual lives in an atmosphere of freedom.

... I see the country going fascist. We have been going that route a long, long time. A lot of things the country has done from its inception were fascist. But now, now I think we are in the face of a terrible fascist dictatorship.

A writer needs certain conditions in which to work and create art. She needs a piece of time; a peace of mind; a quiet place; and a private life.

All you violated ones with gentle hearts; You violent dreamers whose cries shout heartbreak

I believe deeply in a common humanity. The black man belongs to the family of man. One part of that family is out of control - like a virus or cancer - and that is the white man. He and his technological society are bent on destroying the world. Everywhere the white man has gone with his empire, he has destroyed people, races, societies, cultures, and in the course of it, has sterilized himself. He is completely the mechanical man: without heart, without soul. He is the Tin Man of The Wizard of Oz. But I don't believe that all the white people in the world are no good.

I do not believe that hating any man solves the problem of race or any other problem. ... I firmly believe that hatred, like anger, works on the physical glandular system as well as on the moral fiber of our nation, and in doing so, can bring no positive good.

I have always secretly felt that what mankind should be in an ideal sense is that mixture of people and races. I really believe in it. I don't think there is anything sacred in the integrity of race, white or black.

Love stretches your heart and makes you big inside.

Only ways you can keep folks hating is to keep them apart and separated from each other.

When and where will another come to take your holy place? Old man mumbling in his dotage, or crying child, unborn?

White folks needs what black folks got just as much as black folks needs what white folks got, and we's all got to stay here mongst each other and git along, that's what.

You is born lucky, and it's better to be born lucky than born rich, cause if you is lucky you can git rich, but if you is born rich and you ain't lucky you is liables to lose all you got.