Quotes About Empowerment

She needed what most colored girls needed: a chorus of mamas, grandmamas, aunts, cousins, sisters, neighbors, Sunday school teachers, best girl friends, and what all to give her the strength life demanded of her—and the humor with which to live it.

No more running-from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this Earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D. Garner: it cost too much!

You already alone. If you want more alone, I can knock you into the middle of next week, and leave you there.

Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn't allowed to be and stay what I was [...] School teacher changed me. I was something else and that something else was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub. (Paul D.)

Bit by bit, at 124 and in the Clearing, along with others, she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.

Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.

I'll tend to her as no mother ever tended a child, a daughter. Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my own children. I never had to give it to nobody else--and the one time I did it was took from me--they held me down and took it. Milk that belonged to my baby.... I know what it is to be without the milk that belongs to you; to have to fight and holler for it, and to have so little left.

Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.

Gather up your loins, daughter. You named Lillian Florence Jones after my mother. A toughter lady never lived. Find your talent and drive it.

We were two throats and one eye and we had no price.

Everything bad that ever happened to him happened because he couldn't read.

A good man is a good thing, but there is nothing in the world better than a good woman. She can be your mother, your wife, your girlfriend, your sister, or somebody you work next to. Don't matter. You find one, stay there. You see a scary one, make tracks.

I don't want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.

She is not so afraid at night because she is the color of it.

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom.

If I'm here...you can go anywhere you want. Jump if you want to. 'Cause I'll catch you, girl. I'll catch you 'fore you fall.

You your own best thing. -Paul D.

I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.

Together they stood in the doorway. For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words.

You your best thing.

You your best thing, Sethe.

And when she stepped foot on free ground she could not believe that Halle knew what she didn't; that Halle, who had never drawn one free breath, knew that there was nothing like it in this world. It scared her.