Quotes from Ann Petry

If I were a maker of perfumes, I would make one and call it 'Spring,' and it would smell like this cool, sweet, early-morning air.

Everything you ever had, everything you ever lost. It's all there in the trumpet--pain and hate and trouble and peace and quiet and love.

All truly great art is propaganda.

All life goes in a circle, around and around, you started at one place, and then came right back to it again.

Her voice had a thin thread of sadness running through it that made the song important, that made it tell a story that wasn't in the words – a story of despair, of loneliness, of frustration. It was a story that all of them knew by heart and had always known because they had learned it soon after they were born and would go on adding to it until the day they died.

The snow fell softly on the street. It muffled sound. It sent people scurrying homeward, so that the street was soon deserted, empty, quiet. And it could have been any street in the city, for the snow laid a delicate film over the sidewalk, over the brick of the tired, old buildings; gently obscuring the grime and the garbage and the ugliness.

From the time she was born, she had been hemmed into an ever-narrowing space, until now she was very nearly walled in and the wall had been built up brick by brick by eager white hands.

And while you were out working to pay the rent on this stinking, rotten place, why, the street outside played nursemaid to your kid. The street did more than that. It became both mother and father and trained your kid for you, and it was an evil father and a vicious mother, and, of course, you helped the street along by talking to him about money.

Sometimes I look at my own movies

the crap game in progress in the middle of the block, the scraps of obscene talk she heard as she passed the poolroom, the tough young boys with their caps on backward who swaggered by, were things that she saw with the eyes of an adult and reacted to from an adult's point of view. It was impossible to know how this street looked to eight-year-old Bub.

It were purely like a snowball and everybody gave it a push...

People like to see a king uncrowned, like to see a thoroughbred racehorse beaten when he's running at the top of his form and has outrun everything in sight. They wanted to see that the king, the top dog, the best man, has a flaw, can be beaten like them, is vulnerable like them, can be defeated, unfrocked, uncrowned, knocked down, and thus brought right down to their level.

Lutie watched her from the front porch. Damn white people, she thought. Damn them. And then—but it isn't that woman's fault. It's your fault. That's right, but the reason Pop came here to live was because he couldn't get a job and we had to have the State children because Jim couldn't get a job. Damn white people, she repeated.

And then she thought about the other streets. It wasn't just this street that she was afraid of or that was bad. It was any street where people were packed together like sardines in a can.

had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me.

Life is a mysterious and exciting affair and anything can be a thrill if you know how to look for it, and what to do with opportunity when it comes.

And Jim couldn't get a job, though he hunted for one — desperately, eagerly, anxiously. Walking from one employment agency to another; spending long hours in the musty agency waiting-rooms, reading old newspapers. Waiting, waiting, waiting to be called up for a job. He would come home shivering from the cold, saying, 'God damn white people anyway. I don't want favors. All I want is a job. Just a job. Don't they know if I know how I'd change the color of my skin?

Pop didn't believe in discussing problems--'Just goin' out of your way to look for trouble,' was his answer to anything that looked like a serious question.

When she was in high school she had believed that white people wanted their children to be president of the United States; that most of them worked hard with that goal in mind. And if not president--well, perhaps a cabinet member.

There was something inexpressibly dreary about the Casino when it was empty, she thought. You could see all of it for what it was worth, and it was never good to see anything like that.

They may all look alike in the fog, brother, but not under electric light.

We might have been friends, if you had had a slightly lower set of standards, if your judgements of people had been less unkind, less critical; if that outer layer of pride had not been so prickly, so impenetrable.

Mrs. Hedges, I believe you're prejudiced. I didn't know you were that human.' 'I ain't prejudiced,' she said firmly. 'I just ain't got no use for white folks. I don't want 'em anywhere near me. I don't even wanta have to look at 'em. I put up with you because you don't ever stop to think whether folks are white or black and you don't really care. That sort of takes you out of the white folks class.

Listen, Junto,' he said. 'They can wave flags. They can tell me the Germans cut off baby's behinds and rape women and turn black men into slaves. They can tell me any damn thing. None of it means nothing.' 'Why?' 'Because, no matter how scared they are of Germans, they're still more scared of me. I'm black, see? And they hate Germans, but they hate me worse. If that wasn't so they wouldn't have a separate army for black men.