c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
They didn’t realize that if you take away the possibility of pain, and suffering, failure…you also take away the possibility of happiness, success, and joy." -The Old Man: DOMINATUS
— D.W. Ulsterman
Positive thoughts (expectations) can change perspective, transform behaviors, and attract good fortune.
— Donna M. McDine
Great job, you just executed Ben Franklin! - Otto Ray
— Monet Polny, The Lincoln Spy
'All we can see is the surface. But there's so much more we can't see beneath. I bet it's as big as the world down there, underneath the water. There could be anything down there. Things we can't even imagine. How can we understand anything if we can see so little of it?' 
— Augusta Li, Neskaya
I flutter my eyes ladylike. "I know the green fairy is absinthe, but what's the white angel?" "Cocaine. Wilde, by the way frequents this café. He claims he once saw an angel fluttering over the square. I image what he saw flying was one of the stone angels from atop the Opera across the street. No doubt he saw the image after partaking of cocaine and absinthe.
— Carol McCleary, The Alchemy of Murder
See, I know how they do. White folks like to stay in those books. They carry and they keep and they dig in their books, like nothing matters that don’t get written in some book somewhere. Like that’s the only way they can know for sure what happened. They’ll write down who they are and what they did. And their daddies and theirs too. Put it all in a book, then close it up and put it on the shelf. Just to know it’s there so they can sleep at night. Like if they don’t get written down somewhere and they shut their eyes for a minute, they might disappear.
— Margaret Wrinkle
Stars flicker above, points of bright ice in a dark river. I pull a heavy sheepskin around my legs and stretch my feet toward the fire. Despite the cold, Liam plays his flute, the sound whistling through the night. Soon my eyes are heavy, my head nodding.I open my eyes at the deep melodious baritone of Salvius’s voice telling a tale. Liam’s flute is silent now. I have heard Salvius tell many tales on market days; he is known for his memory of wandering minstrels and mummers who visit us at Whitsunday and through Midsummer. Salvius is a mockingbird: he can give a fair charade of the rhythmic tones of any wandering bard or any noble of the Royal Court.In this darkness, his eyes catch the light like a cat in the night.
— Ned Hayes, Sinful Folk
Why write about the past? Well, there's more of it.
— John Cleese
I have found that those who try to shield us from the truth, regardless of the reason, end up doing the greatest harm. Truth alone sets you free, not lies and omissions.
— Jessica Dotta, Born of Persuasion
Everything burns if the flame is hot enough. The world is nothing but a crucible.
— Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle
happy is the nation without a history
— Cesare Beccaria, Dos Delitos e das Penas
The great city seemed to weigh upon me, as though it were crushing me under its heap of brick and stone. Gray, drizzly skies, congested streets, the soot-belching boats and barges chugging up and down the Thames, the teeming mass of four millions hastening about the countless activities of daily life in a metropolis, things adventurous, meaningful, spiritual, quotidian, futile, criminal, meaningless and absurd. Amidst this seething stew of humanity, I painted.
— Gary Inbinder, The Flower to the Painter
A prince may be seen happy today and ruined tomorrow without having shown any chance in his character. For the prince who relies entirely on fortune is lost when it changes...
— Neil Jordan, The Borgia Apocalypse: The Screenplay
At the edge of the still, dark pool that was the sea, at the brimming edge of freedom where no boat was to be seen, she spoke the first words of the few they were to exchange. ‘I cannot swim. You know it?” In the dark she saw the flash of his smile. ‘Trust me.’ And he drew her with a strong hand until the green phosphorescence beaded her ankles, and deeper, and deeper, until the thick milk-warm water, almost unfelt, was up to her waist. She heard him swear feelingly to himself as the salt water searched out, discovered his burns. Then with a rustle she saw his pale head sink back into the quiet sea and at the same moment she was gripped and drawn after him, her face to the stars, drawn through the tides with the sea lapping like her lost hair at her cheeks, the drive of his body beneath her pulling them both from the shore. They were launched on the long journey towards the slim shape, black against glossy black, which was the brigantine, with Thompson on board.
— Dorothy Dunnett, The Disorderly Knights
It was so cold. In the monastery. Sometimes the wind came from the sea with ice in it... It could freeze the skin off your face. Once the snow was so deep we couldn't get out of the doors to the woodshed. A monk jumped from a window. He sank into a drift and took a long time to get up. That night, they made me sleep next to the stove. I was small, thin, like a piece of birch bark. But then the Stove went out.Father Bernard took me into his cell... It was he who first gave me chalk and paper. He was so old his eyes his eyes looked as if he was crying. But he was never sad. In winter he had fewer blankets than the others. He said he didn't need them because God warmed him.(...)But even Father Bernard was cold that night. He laid me down on the bed next to him, wrapped me in an animal skin, then in his own arms. He told me stories about Jesus. How His love could wake the dead and how with Him in one's heart one could heat the world... When I woke it was light. The snow had stopped. I was warm. But he was cold. I gave him the skin but his body was stiff. I didn't know what to do. I got out a piece of paper from his chest under the bed and drew him, lying there. His face had a smile on it. I knew that God had been there when he died. That now He was in me, and because of Father Bernard I would be warm forever.
— Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus
Wouldn't you like to be my lord Duke of Exeter? Come on, Dom. Say something.""You have lost your mind.""Say something less insulting.
— Laura Andersen, The Boleyn Deceit
Two hundred and fifty years of nameless, faceless, forgotten individuals. Yes, they were America's founding fathers and mothers as much as the bewigged white men who laid the whips upon their backs. Why didn't Lina know their names? Why hadn't she studied their histories? Where was the monument? Where was the museum? What had they wished for and worked for and loved?
— Tara Conklin
It’s finding out where we came from that helps guide us to where we are going.
— Mona Rodriguez
To those of you who are enslaved by your past, may my story set you free. For youth is innocent and its beauty is to always be cherished.
— Nancy B. Brewer, The House with the Red Light
Some of the braver say I am mad.
— Katlyn Charlesworth, The Glass Piano
From my Facebook Page: "You spend the first 50 years acquiring and the second 50 years getting rid of
— Mary R. Woldering, Voices in Crystal
It is important for a woman to have the duplicity to make good use of whatever gifts she might have, however valueless they might seem... You have to have the inner strength to pursue your goal, and not care how many enemies you make along the road. It is not easy.
— Anne O'Brien, The King's Concubine: A Novel of Alice Perrers
People think blood red, but blood don't got no colour. Not when blood wash the floor she lying on as she scream for that son of a bitch to come, the lone baby of 1785. Not when the baby wash in crimson and squealing like it just depart heaven to come to hell, another place of red. Not when the midwife know that the mother shed too much blood, and she who don't reach fourteen birthday yet speak curse 'pon the chile and the papa, and then she drop down dead like old horse. Not when blood spurt from the skin, on spring from the axe, the cat-o'-nine, the whip, the cane and the blackjack and every day in slave life is a day that colour red. It soon come to pass when red no different from white or blue or black or nothing. Two black legs spread wide and mother mouth screaming. A black baby wiggling in blood on the floor with skin darker than midnight but the greenest eyes anybody ever done seen. I goin' call her Lilith. You can call her what they call her.
— Marlon James, The Book of Night Women
We may be finished with the past but the past is not finished with us.
— Donald Riggio, Seven-Inch Vinyl: A Rock and Roll Novel
How easy it is to do wrong when there is someone else to blame.
— Jenny Lloyd, Leap the Wild Water
There is an arch supported by four vast columns. Etched over hundreds and hundreds of yards of stone, furlongs of stone, there are names: "Who are these, these? The men who died in this battle?""No. The lost, the ones they did not find. The others are in the cemeteries.""These are just the ... the unfound." When she could speak again. From the whole war?"The man shook his head. "Just these fields."Elizabeth sat on the steps. "No one told me. My God no one told me,
— Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong
Jess Pepper's review of the Avalon Strings:'In a land so very civilized and modern as ours, it is unpopular to suggest that the mystical isle of Avalon ever truly existed. But I believe I have found proof of it right here in Manhattan.To understand my reasoning, you must recall first that enchanting tale of a mist-enshrouded isle where medieval women--descended from the gods--spawned heroic men. Most notable among these was the young King Arthur. In their most secret confessions, these mystic heroes acknowledged Avalon, and particularly the music of its maidens, as the source of their power.Many a school boy has wept reading of Young King Arthur standing silent on the shore as the magical isle disappears from view, shrouded in mist.The boy longs as Arthur did to leap the bank and pilot his canoe to the distant, singing atoll. To rejoin nymphs who guard in the depths of their water caves the meaning of life. To feel again the power that burns within. But knowledge fades and memory dims, and schoolboys grow up. As the legend goes, the way became unknown to mortal man. Only woman could navigate the treacherous blanket of white that dipped and swirled at the surface of the water.And with its fading went also the music of the fabled isle.Harps and strings that heralded the dawn and incited robed maidens to dance evaporated into the mists of time, and silence ruled.But I tell you, Kind Reader, that the music of Avalon lives. The spirit that enchanted knights in chain mail long eons ago is reborn in our fair city, in our own small band of fair maids who tap that legendary spirit to make music as the Avalon Strings.Theirs is no common gift. Theirs is no ordinary sound. It is driven by a fire from within, borne on fingers bloodied by repetition. Minds tormented by a thirst for perfection.And most startling of all is the voice that rises above, the stunning virtuoso whose example leads her small company to higher planes.Could any other collection of musicians achieve the heights of this illustrious few? I think not.I believe, Friends of the City, that when we witnes their performance, as we may almost nightly at the Warwick Hotel, we witness history's gift to this moment in time. And for a few brief moments in the presence of these maids, we witness the fiery spirit that endured and escaped the obliterating mists of Avalon.
— Bailey Bristol, The Devil's Dime
Amy wondered if Bonaparte could declare war on Miss Gwen alone without breaking his peace with England
— Lauren Willig, The Secret History of the Pink Carnation
All that I was and the world that was mine are gone forever.
— Jenny Lloyd, Leap the Wild Water
It seemed the heavens themselves conspired to cover up our crime.
— Jenny Lloyd, Leap the Wild Water
Sometimes, the choices we make have devastating consequences
— Jeanette Vaughan
Megan’s deception is another hook on which I can hang my conscience.
— Jenny Lloyd, Leap the Wild Water
They do not call him the terror of husbands and lovers for no reason...
— Andrea Zuvich, His Last Mistress
And I tell her about his description because I want her to know what I now know, which is that the place where the pepper grows is not a place to be afraid of…I tell her: Mama, exile is not always the darkest corner of the earth. Sometimes it is lush and plentiful, sometimes it is full of life…
— Carola Perla, Gibbin House
On Christmas morning, Rebecca lost her moral virginity, her sense of humor - and her two best friends. But, other than that, it was a hell of a holiday.
— Ellen Emerson White, The Road Home
What I was caught up in, I dimly understood, was the embodiment of history
— Peter        Cunningham, The Sea and the Silence
Gentlemen. You are looking at the true Abraham Lincoln of Arabia. And in order to end our internal bickering - our civil war, if you will - I have solicited your aid.
— Leonard Leventon, Brethren: A Gripping Tale of Counter Espionage
There is a little bit of everybody in everybody.
— Leonard Leventon
Everyone is a criminal! We are beset on all sides by antirevolutionary forces. Naturally, then, humans fall into three categories: the criminal, the not-yet-criminal, and the not-yet-caught.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless
All that that I learn just teaches me that I know nothing.
— Philippa Gregory, The Lady of the Rivers
Once more, I am watching the most powerful men in the kingdom bring their power to bear on a woman who has done nothing worse than live to the beat of her own heart, see with her own eyes; but this is not their tempo nor their vision and they cannot tolerate any other.
— Philippa Gregory, The Lady of the Rivers
Ann Boleyn...a Renaissance Audrey Hepburn in a little black dress.
— JoAnn Spears
Most of [her ashes] fell into the river in a long gray curtain. But some was caught by the wind and blown upward toward the blue spring sky where it swirled a moment in the air, before dissolving into sunlight.
— Kimberly Cutter, The Maid
Cowan son of Branieucc, you're the only one of my people that I know for sure still lives.
— Sandi Layne, Éire's Captive Moon
The lines in the corners of her eyes spoke of years of wisdom, as a tree with the number of rings increasing with each passing year. She was a small frame of a woman with piercing eyes that suggested that they knew you, understood you even.
— F.C. Malby, Take Me to the Castle
I said to my mother, Henry VII is interesting. No he's not, my mother said.
— Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir
I studied how to use the clothes washer. The handy instructions on the lid helped
—  so did the box of suds. It instructed me to separate the whites from the coloreds. Laundry will be the last American institution to desegregate.
It wasn't my choice to write this story...it was my responsibility.
— Rhonda Fink-Whitman, 94 Maidens
This building fool could only be Bess of Hardwicke, a woman whose name is seldom seen in print without the word “redoubtable” in front of it. I wondered if anyone ever called her redoubtable to her face. I redoubted it.
— JoAnn Spears
Don't ever let anyone tell you that things can't be changed, that things can't be done. The can and they will, if we are united in what we believe.
— F.C. Malby, Take Me to the Castle
The sublime beauty was almost hidden withing the castle walls. She believed that the treasured things in life were often hard to find - a pearl in an oyster shell, a kind word in the heat of the moment.
— F.C. Malby, Take Me to the Castle
As people's hopes soared, Jana felt a tinge of fear.
— F.C. Malby, Take Me to the Castle
He nodded, looking across the room at the sea of photographers and journalists. The microphones spread around him like birds waiting to be fed.
— F.C. Malby, Take Me to the Castle
Mr Martinek turned back to Jana. 'Thirty-eight per cent alcohol, sixty-two per cent fire - all the way from Karlovy Vary.
— F.C. Malby, Take Me to the Castle
As the sun lowered into the city's skyline, casting an orange glow over the islands, Jana could feel people's hopes rising.
— F.C. Malby, Take Me to the Castle
9 November 1989. A day nobody would forget. She had heard rumours about the wall.
— F.C. Malby, Take Me to the Castle
I don't know, Benes. I'm not sure I've ever really understood women for that kind of commitment.' He flipped his beer mat up int the air with his index finger and caught it in his hand.
— F.C. Malby, Take Me to the Castle
To Jana's mind everybody seemed happy to see BAbichka and resisted returning her, like a misplaced package sent to the wrong address. It was as if the recipient opened it up, knowing it should be returned, but wondering who long they could legitimately keep it before being changed with theft.
— F.C. Malby, Take Me to the Castle
The others moved in like a wake of vultures, ready to devour their prey. she had seen it on television once. 'Scavengers,' Tatinek called them. They swoop in and feed off the carcasses of animals that are too weak to escape - lots of them on battlefields. This looked the same, only the victim wasn't there, just his writing, his typewriter, and bits of dark paper.
— F.C. Malby, Take Me to the Castle
One word was the method by which the state collected their information. They could reel in the informants and spread them out like tentacles, ready to sting in any direction.
— F.C. Malby, Take Me to the Castle
I am a survivor. But I am not unique of the people that survived the great late war. We all have our stories to tell. But for most of us the hardened corners have soften with the passage of time.
— Nancy B. Brewer, Lizzie After the War
All good things originate with the Creator God, he'd been taught, and the Song of Life was no exception.
— Sandi Layne, Éire's Captive Moon
You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.
— Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
One night when the moon was full, I explained to you about how the moon controls the tides, and you said I was like the moon and you were the sea, always following me about. And I said nothing, because I knew it was truly the other way around.
— Sarah Bower, Sins of the House of Borgia
If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent Him. But all nature cries aloud that He does exist."(Voltaire)
— Elizabeth Kales
After all, that's why we read historical fiction-to be transported to another time, and to be astonished at ancient people's lives and traditions, just as they would probably be astonished at ours.
— Michelle Moran
Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if not to win, and if not to win, then to die?
— Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
How many men can say, as I must, 'I am a man whose only friend is the King of England'? I have everything, you would think. And yet take Henry away, and I have nothing.
— Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
Messages continued to arrive from the Earl of Warwick, urging Londoners to hold firm for King Harry. Marguerite d'Anjou and her son were expected to land at any time, while from St Albans, Edward sent word that Harry of Lancaster was to be considered a prisoner of state. At that, John Stockton, the Mayor of London, contracted a diplomatic virus and took to his bed.
— Sharon Kay Penman, The Sunne in Splendour
You know what it's like when a cart overturns in the street? Everybody you meet has witnessed it. They saw a man's leg sliced clean off. They saw a woman gasp her last. They saw the goods looted, thieves stealing from the back-end while the carter was crushed at the front. They heard a man roar out his last confession, while another whispered his last will and testament. And if all the people who say they were there had really been there, then the dregs of London would have drained to the one spot, the gaols emptied of thieves, the beds empty of whores, and all the lawyers standing on the shoulders of the butchers to get a better look.
— Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
... every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.
— Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
Go back to bed, Cowan. I want no promises from you.
— Sandi Layne, Éire's Captive Moon
No man as godly as George, the only fault he finds with God is that he made folk with too few orifices. If George could meet a woman with a quinny under her armpit, he would call out 'Glory be' and set her up in a house and visit her every day, until the novelty wore off. Nothing is forbidden to George, you see. He'd go to it with a terrier bitch if she wagged her tail at him and said bow-wow.'For once he is struck silent. He knows he will never get it out of his mind, the picture of George in a hairy grapple with a little ratting dog.
— Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
Every time you go to see Hamlet you don't expect it to have a happy ending...you're still enthralled.(Interview BBC Radio 4 Today 17 October 2012.)
— Hilary Mantel
... those sectaries in Europe who are always expecting the end of the world, but who hope that, after the earth has been consumed by fire, they will be seated in glory: grilled a little, crisp at the edges and blackened in parts, but still, thanks be to God, alive for eternity, and seated at his right hand.
— Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
Riding a bull must be a bit like flying an ultralight. You get up there and have an exhilarating ride, but then you still have to get down.
— Susan  Spence, A Story of the West
Where do you go when you die twice-lest a thousand deaths?
— Katlyn Charlesworth, A Thousand Deaths
The urge to draw near to the female silhouette resided deep in the ancient center of a man...
— Kelly O'Connor McNees, In Need of a Good Wife
If Mary's blood is Spanish, at least it is royal. And at least she can walk straight and has control of her bowels.
— Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
Our house has its back to the sea,' writes Hester in her journal. 'Below us, the ocean spreads to the sky, twitching wide and blue and hungry. One would think it to be infinite. But we, of course, know better.
— Tanya Moir, La Rochelle's Road
He draws a line under his conclusions. Says, 'Gregory, what should I do about the great worm?' 'Send a commission against it, sir,' the boy says. 'It must be put down.' He gives his son a long look. 'You do know it's Arthur Cobbler's tales?' Gregory gives him a long look back. 'Yes, I do know.' He sounds regretful. 'But it makes people so happy when I believe them.
— Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
But you see, Crumb, it is hard to give up what you have worked at since you were a boy. There were some Italian visitors once, they were cheering us on, Brandon and myself, and they thought that Achilles and Hector had come back to life. So they said.'But which is which? One dragged through the dust by the other ...The king says, 'You turn your boy out beautifully. No nobleman could do more.''I don't want him to be Achilles,' he says, 'I only want him not to be flattened.
— Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
It is dark and there are bad creatures in these woods.""Yes, there are...
— Katlyn Charlesworth, A Thousand Deaths
I knew why earlier generations once believed that the sun circled the earth. Because, in our limited imaginations, that is how we lived our lives. -Mrs. Tuesday's Departure
— Suzanne Anderson
The end is but a new beginning for the eternal "Ba.
— Inge H. Borg, Khamsin The Devil Wind of the Nile
THE FIGHTING IN THE PEACH ORCHARD AT GETTYSBURGPROLOGUE"The same young men who crowded each other as they faced the recruiters' tables now crowded each other as they died.
— Charles   Phillips, The Sharpshooter 1862-1864
JAKE BAKER JOINING THE UNION ARMY IN NEW ORLEANS"I'd prefer to be back in Texas, taking aim at the Rebs..., but I just can't do that," said Jake. ..."So, I'll just do what I can do, I guess.""I suspect that goes for all of us," said the Colonel. "Maybe we should make that the unit's motto. 'The First Texas Cavalry of the United States of America: We'll just do what we can do, we guess.' It does have a ring to it, but I expect that we need somethin' a bit more inspirational and less true.
— Charles   Phillips, The Sharpshooter 1862-1864
That is our Shield Ring, our last stronghold; not the barrier fells and the totter-moss between, but something in the hearts of men.
— Rosemary Sutcliff, The Shield Ring
The Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte had been banished to the island of Elba. However His Imperial Majesty had some doubts wheter a quiet island life would suit him - he was, after all, accustomed to governing a large proportion of the known world.
— Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Sunset encroached upon daylight like a powder burst from the mouth of a crimson cannon—orange and gold ribbons shot forth to wage a battle against the clouds. The western horizon was obscured by a glow like a living thing.
— Marsha Ward, Ride to Raton
Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin - that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns.
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Stuff and nonsense: you must regard this deviationfrom your plan as part of the adventure that you soughtwhen you decided embark on it in the first place. Trueadventure does not follow well-trodden paths. Absenceof certainty is its essence. People, like you and I, whochoose to shun the mundane must not only expect, butalso enjoy and profit from surprises.
— Adam Yamey, Aliwal
Just before he passed behind the hedge at the end of the drive, he turned to look back at Stoke Morrow and caught me spying on him. His shining eyes were so cruel, and before I could close the curtain, I saw the flash of an awful grin on his face. It was a grin that said he knew I'd come around. Sooner or later, I'd fall in line.
— Adam McOmber, The White Forest
He is not a man wedded to action, Boleyn, but rather a man who stands by, smirking and stroking his beard; he thinks he looks enigmatic, but instead he looks as if he's pleasuring himself.
— Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
Oh, she's still here;she's just not as pretty... anymore.
— Katlyn Charlesworth, A Thousand Deaths
Listen, my child, to the voices of your ancestors. Take pride in our accomplishments; find your strength in our suffering. For WE are not just voices in the wind, WE are a living part of YOU
— Nancy B. Brewer, Beyond Sandy Ridge
Where are these fucking guns coming from?
— Michael Manley former prime minister of Jamaica
I could faintly smell the ocean. I imagined being one of the old oak trees standing there swaying in the wind and braving all sorts of weather. I pondered what they had seen in the past and what they might see in the future
— Nancy B. Brewer
Children worked in the mills: "I will always believe that children are designed for green meadows and play, not for factories and cotton dust.
— Nancy B. Brewer
Papa was our strength and the very fiber that wove our family together. He was our foundation and our rock, but even rocks, break, given enough stress.
— Nancy B. Brewer
Perhaps you have visited my grave and flowers left, but did you hear me cry out to you!
— Nancy B. Brewer
Jennings is too tough and honest a writer to let anyone off her moral hook, even her hero.
— Maureen Jennings, Let Loose the Dogs
Mothers cry in anguishand fathers curse in anger,while others turn away in sadness,all for the children who are lost.
— Katlyn Charlesworth, A Thousand Deaths
Ain’t nothing too serious. Even death is a joke on the old devil, if we are living for the Lord.
— Nancy B. Brewer, Beyond Sandy Ridge
I was too far away to hear what was said but I saw in Val’s eyes the same fear that I had once known and could well guess at Lucas’ unthinking remark.
— Julia Lee Dean
Soeur Seraphina gently removed my lace fontanges. It was named for the King’s mistress Angelique de Fontanges, who had lost her hat while hunting one day and had hastily tied up her curls with her garter. The King had admired the effect, and the next day all the court ladies had appeared with their curls tied back with lace
— Kate Forsyth
The Baptist Church rejects man with wooden leg: It appears the Baptist preacher refused to baptize a veteran of the late war in the holy water- saying they only baptize flesh and blood, not wood.
— Nancy B. Brewer, Lizzie After the War
Are you a traveling man he asked?
— Nancy B. Brewer
During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.
— Nelson Mandela
Relaxing your hair is like being in prison. You're caged in. Your hair rules you. You didn't go running with Curt today because you don't want to sweat out this straightness. You're always battling to make your hair do what it wasn't meant to do.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Alexa and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for for choice and certainty.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Hockey is a sport for white men. Basketball is a sport for black men. Golf is a sport for white men dressed like black pimps.
— Tiger Woods
Part of the racialized sexism wants everyone to think that a 15-year old Mexican is not a girl, she’s a woman. We know she’s a girl. We can never emphasize this enough, because this is the fate of colored girls globally right now: the denial of their girlhood, the denial of their childhood, and the constant state of risk and danger they are living in.
— bell hooks, Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism
No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
— Booker T. Washington
To be white, or straight, or male, or middle class is to be simultaneously ubiquitious and invisible. You’re everywhere you look, you’re the standard against which everyone else is measured. You’re like water, like air. People will tell you they went to see a “woman doctor” or they will say they went to see “the doctor.” People will tell you they have a “gay colleague” or they’ll tell you about a colleague. A white person will be happy to tell you about a “Black friend,” but when that same person simply mentions a “friend,” everyone will assume the person is white. Any college course that doesn’t have the word “woman” or “gay” or “minority” in its title is a course about men, heterosexuals, and white people. But we call those courses “literature,” “history” or “political science.”This invisibility is political.
— Michael S. Kimmel, Privilege: A Reader
Some folks call her a runaway. A failure in the race. But she knows where her ticket takes her. She will find her place in the sun
— Tracy Chapman
The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue
—  I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America.
If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
My color is my joy and not my burden...
— Bebe Moore Campbell, Brothers and Sisters
The white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want to with us.
— Richard Wright, Native Son
Indian believes they ain't but two sins... bein a coward... and turnin agin yer own kind.
— Forrest Carter, The Outlaw Josey Wales
I think you should know that real-life white people are not all as funny as the ones on 'Seinfeld'.
— Aaron McGruder
I whisper like the sea in the horse's ear.
— Maggie Stiefvater, The Scorpio Races
For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my 'race,' unless I was permitted to put 'human.' The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put 'white,' which is not even a color let alone a 'race,' and I sternly declined to put 'Caucasian,' which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you 'black.
— Christopher Hitchens
Though many non-Native Americans have learned very little about us, over time we have had to learn everything about them. We watch their films, read their literature, worship in their churches, and attend their schools. Every third-grade student in the United States is presented with the concept of Europeans discovering America as a "New World" with fertile soil, abundant gifts of nature, and glorious mountains and rivers. Only the most enlightened teachers will explain that this world certainly wasn't new to the millions of indigenous people who already lived here when Columbus arrived.
— Wilma Mankiller, Every Day Is a Good Day: Reflections by Contemporary Indigenous Women
A significant number of people believe tribal people still live and dress as they did 300 years ago. During my tenure as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, national news agencies requesting interviews sometimes asked if they could film a tribal dance or if I would wear traditional tribal clothing for the interview. I doubt they asked the president of the United States to dress like a pilgrim for an interview.
— Wilma Mankiller
…“white supremacy” is a much more useful term for understanding the complicity of people of color in upholding and maintaining racial hierarchies that do not involve force (i.e slavery, apartheid) than the term “internalized racism”- a term most often used to suggest that black people have absorbed negative feelings and attitudes about blackness. The term “white supremacy” enables us to recognize not only that black people are socialized to embody the values and attitudes of white supremacy, but we can exercise “white supremacist control” over other black people.
— bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black
I had as many doubts as anyone else. Standing on the starting line, we're all cowards.
— Alberto Salazar
I’m not that kind of Indian,” Shanti said, her practiced smile never leaving her face, though it faltered just a bit, and in that slight wobble was something hard and angry, something that looked like centuries of colonial oppression boiling up into an I’m-going-to-kick-your-ass-in-this-pageant-and-then-take-over-all-your-beauty-out-sourcing-needs hatred.
— Libba Bray, Beauty Queens
Concurrently, the growing class power and public voice of conservative and liberal well-to-do black folks easily obscures the class cruelty these individuals enact both in the way they talk about underprivileged blacks and the way they represent them. The existence of that class cruelty and its fascist dimensions have been somewhat highlighted by the efforts of privileged-class blacks to censor the voices of black youth, particularly gangsta rappers who are opposing bourgeois class values by extolling the values of street culture and street vernacular. Significantly, the attack on urban underclass black youth culture and its gangster dimensions (glamorization of crime, etc.) is usually presented via a critique of sexism. Since most privileged-class blacks have shown no interest in advancing feminist politics, the only organized effort to end sexism and sexist oppression, this attack on sexism seems merely gratuitous, a smoke screen that deflects away from the fact that what really disturbs bourgeois folks is the support of rebellion, unruly behavior, and disrespect for their class values. In reality, they and their white counterparts fear the power these young folks have to change the minds and life choices of youth from privileged classes. If only underclass black folks were listening to gangsta rap, there would be no public effort to silence and censor this music. The fear is that it will generate class rebellion.
— bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism
It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.
— James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Sometimes I'm a black. Not everyone realizes blackness has to be conferred upon you again and again. It's like getting your nails done. Or being pantsed. People assume I'm cool.
— Laura Yes Yes, How to Seduce a White Boy in Ten Easy Steps
Never to have to think of yourself as white is a luxory that makes you deeply stupid.
— Leonard Michaels, The Collected Stories
Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"-- they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. (p. 107-108)
— Cornel West, Race Matters
You're in a horse race but you're thinking like a sheep. Sheep don't win horse races.
— Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro's making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence. But every group is responsible for its continuance.... Both races need to understand that their rights and duties are mutual and equal and their interests in the common good are idential.... There is no help or healing in apparaising past responsibilities or in present apportioning of praise or blame. The past is of value only as it aids in understanding the present; and an understanding of the facts of the problem--a magnanimous understanding by both races--is the first step toward its solution.
— Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
...But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative—the purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty. What aesthetic is adequate to the Holocaust, or to the recent tragedy in Haiti? Narrative is not exculpatory—it is in fact about culpability, about recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us. If we’re to say anything important, we require an art less facile, and editors willing to seek it.
— Michael Copperman
In the United States both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences. With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g. DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic "racial" groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within "racial" groups than between them. In neighboring populations there is much overlapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions. Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species.
— American Anthropological Association
J.W. and Roy didn’t just snatch the childhood away from Emmett
—  they stole it from every single black child in Mississippi.
You don't have to be white to be white, you just have to be rich.
— Christian Lander
All this because one race did not have the decency to be ashamed of dealing in human flesh.
— Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt
That which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal.
— Aristotle, Physics
When I lived on the Bluff in Yokohama I spend a good deal of my leisure in the company of foreign residents, at their banquets and balls. At close range I was not particularly struck by their whiteness, but from a distance I could distinguish them quite clearly from the Japanese. Among the Japanese were ladies who were dressed in gowns no less splendid than the foreigners’, and whose skin was whiter than theirs. Yet from across the room these ladies, even one alone, would stand out unmistakably from amongst a group of foreigners. For the Japanese complexion, no matter how white, is tinged by a slight cloudiness. These women were in no way reticent about powdering themselves. Every bit of exposed flesh—even their backs and arms—they covered with a thick coat of white. Still they could not efface the darkness that lay below their skin. It was as plainly visible as dirt at the bottom of a pool of pure water. Between the fingers, around the nostrils, on the nape of the neck, along the spine—about these places especially, dark, almost dirty, shadows gathered. But the skin of the Westerners, even those of a darker complexion, had a limpid glow. Nowhere were they tainted by this gray shadow. From the tops of their heads to the tips of their fingers the whiteness was pure and unadulterated. Thus it is that when one of us goes among a group of Westerners it is like a grimy stain on a sheet of white paper. The sight offends even our own eyes and leaves none too pleasant a feeling.
— Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
Friendship is greater than the colonial and dominating race ideologies of hundreds of years." -"Some of My Best Friends
— Luis J. Rodríguez
Pride is the problem. Everyone wants to be right so badly they overlook the "rights" of others.
— Carlos Wallace
I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.
— Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
brown life is an unbroken bearing of the weight and hollow of the active absence of brown life.
— Vivek Shraya, Even this Page is White
Needless to say, this fragile experiment began by taking for granted the ugly conquest of Amerindians and Mexicans, the exclusion of women, the subordination of European working-class men and the closeting of homosexuals. These realities made many of the words of the revolutionary Declaration of Independence ring a bit hollow. yet the enslavement of Africans -- over 20 percent of the population -- served as the linchpin of American democracy; that is, the much-heralded stability and continuity of American democracy was predicated upon black oppression and degradation. Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white -- they would be only Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and others engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity.
— Cornel West, Race Matters
Human colour is the colour I'm truly interested in, the colour of your humanity. May the size of your heart and the depth of your soul be your currency. welcome aboard my Good Ship. Let us sail to the colourful island of misex identity. You can eat from the cooking pot of mixed culture and bathe in the cool shade of being mixed-race. There is no need for a passport. There are no borders. We are all citizens of the world. Whatever shade you are, bring your light, bring your colour, bring your music and your books, your stories and your histories, and climb aboad. United as a people we are a million majestic colours, together we are a glorious stained-glass window. We are building a cathedral of otherness, brick by brick and book by book. Raise your glass of rum, let's toast to the minorities who are the majority. There's no stopping time, nor the blurring of lines or the blending of shades. With a spirit of hope I leave you now. I drink to our sameness and to our unique differences. This is the twenty-first century and we share this, we live here, in the future. It is a beautiful morning, it is first light on the time of being other, so get out from that shade and feel the warmth of being outside.You tick: Other.
— Salena Godden
I don't expect everyone to feel the same way that I do about land. For so many of us, the scars are still too fresh. Fields of cotton stretching to the horizon - land worked, sweated, and suffered over for the profit of others - probably don't engender warm feelings among most black people. But the land, in spite of its history, still holds hope for making good on the promises we thought it could, especially if we can reconnect to it. The reparations lie not in what someone will give us, but in what we already own. The land can grow crops for us as well as it does for others. It can yield loblolly pine and white oak for us as it has for others. And it can nurture wildlife and the spirit for us, just like it has for others.
— J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature
The wild things and places belong to all of us. So while I can't fix the bigger problems of race in the United States - can't suggest a means by which I, and others like me, will always feel safe - I can prescribe a solution in my own small corner. Get more people of color "out there." Turn oddities into commonplace. The presence of more black birders, wildlife biologists, hunters, hikers, and fisher-folk will say to others that we, too, appreciate the warble of a summer tanager, the incredible instincts of a whitetail buck, and the sound of wind in the tall pines. Our responsibility is to pass something on to those coming after. As young people of color reconnect with what so many of their ancestors knew - that our connections to the land run deep, like the taproots of mighty oaks; that the land renews and sustains us - maybe things will begin to change.
— J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature
I recall a podcast featuring American white nationalist Jared Taylor. He claims that every important decision in their lives - where to live, whom to marry, where to send their children to school - 'liberals are not different from members of the Ku Klux Klan'.And, if you believe the Age article, in the only federal electorate held by the Greens, families are making their schooling decision as if they're in the UPF.
— John Safran, Depends What You Mean By Extremist
After so many years struggling to keep up with you, I finally realized we’re not even running the same race.
— Scott Stabile
In that strained, still second when her eyes met Christina Tomas's before she took the forms, she shrank. She shrank like a dried leaf. She had spoken English all her life, led the debating society in secondary school, and always thought the American twang inchoate; she should not have cowered and shrunk, but she did. And in the following weeks, as autumn's coolness descended, she began to practice an American accent.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie