Toni Cade Bambara Quotes

Take away the miseries and you take away some folks' reason for living.

living reason

I'll be damned if I want most folks out there to do unto me what they do unto themselves

The dream is real, my friends. The failure to realize it is the only unreality.

dreams failure real dream friends unreality realize

[W]e have not been scuffling in this waste-howling wildness for the right to be stupid.

stupid

Our lives preserved. How it was; and how it be. Passing it along in the relay. That is what I work to do: to produce stories that save our lives.

work stories lives save

Writing, like dreams, confronts, pushes you up against the evasions, self-deceptions, investments in opinions and interpretations, the clutter that blinds, that disguises that underlying, all-encompassing design...

dreams design writing opinions

Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.

writing transformation

I've never been convinced that experience is linear, circular, or even random. It just is. I try to put it in some kind of order to extract meaning from it, to bring meaning to it.

order experience