Ntozake Shange quotes:

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.

I'm a firm believer that language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives and other people's lives.

I've never thought of leaving the South, never.

I'm committed to the idea that one of the few things human beings have to offer is the richness of unconscious and conscious emotional responses to being alive. ... The kind of esteem that's given to brightness/smartness obliterates average people or slow learners from participating fully in human life, particularly technical and intellectual life. But you cannot exclude any human being from emotional participation.

And this is for Colored girls who have considered suicide, but are moving to the ends of their own rainbows.

When I die, I will no be guilty of having left a generation of girls behind thinking that anyone can tend to their emotional health other than themselves.

Where there is a woman there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits.

I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager. . .and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that. . .

If anything is life-changing, being the descendant of a slave is.

Multiculturalism isn't about culture, it's about power.

Multiculturalism is a white people joke.

Being alive and being a woman is all I got, but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't conquered yet.

Creation is everything you do. Make something.

Our society allows people to be absolutely neurotic and totally out of touch with their feelings and everyone else's feelings, and yet be very respectable.

right now being born a girl is to be born threatened ...

When words & manners leave you no space for yourself make very personal very clear & your obstructions will join you or disappear.

Where there is a woman there is magic.

nice is such a rip-off.

in our ordinaryness we are most bizarre.

I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager... and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that.

I am gonna write poems til i die and when i have gotten outta this body i am gonna hang round in the wind and knock over everybody who got their feet on the ground.

i found god in myself and i loved her i loved her fiercely

I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.

i usedta live in the world really be in the world free & sweet talkin good mornin & thank-you & nice day uh huh i cant now i cant be nice to nobody nice is such a rip-off regular beauty & a smile in the street is just a set-up

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.

my spirit is too ancient to understand the separation of soul & gender

one thing I don't need is any more apologies i got sorry greetin me at my front door you can keep yrs i don't know what to do wit em they don't open doors or bring the sun back they don't make me happy or get a mornin paper didn't nobody stop usin my tears to wash cars cuz a sorry.

our dreams draw blood from old sores.

somebody/ anybody sing a black girl's song bring her out to know herself to know you but sing her rhythms carin/ struggle/ hard times sing her song of life she's been dead so long closed in silence so long she doesn't know the sound of her own voice her infinite beauty she's half-notes scattered without rhythm/ no tune sing her sighs sing the song of her possibilities sing a righteous gospel let her be born let her be born & handled warmly.

The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.

Novels allow me to create a whole world.