Ishmael Reed Quotes
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Democracy and freedom began bouncing all over the world like bad checks.
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Neo-Hoodoo is the 8 basic dances of 19th century New Orleans' Place Congo- the Calinda the Bamboula the Chacta the Babouille the Conjaille the Juba the Congo and the VooDoo- modernized into the Philly Dog, the Hully Gully, the Funky Chicken, the Popcorn, the Boogaloo and the dance of great American choreographer Buddy Bradley.
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All art must be for the end of liberating the masses. A landscape is only good when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree.
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What is the American fetish about highways? They want to get somewhere, LaBas offers. Because something is after them, Black Herman adds. But what is after them? They are after themselves. They call it destiny. Progress.
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I finally had to go to the American Civil Liberties Union here in northern California to get my reply published to what I considered to be a hatchet job done by Stanley Crouch.
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America is the smart-aleck adolescent who’s “been around” and has his own hot rod.
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Time is a pendulum. Not a river. More akin to what goes around comes around.
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I had no systematic way of learning but proceeded like a quilt maker, a patch of knowledge here a patch there but lovingly knitted. I would hungrily devour the intellectual scraps and leftovers of the learned.
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Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.
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I'm sure that you could go back and make a graph showing that all the killings of black males increased in times of economic difficulty. As a matter of fact, a black man was lynched last year.
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The Thing has stirred in its moorings. The Thing that my Grandfather Harry and his generation of Harrys had thought was nothing but a false alarm.
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We will leap tall couplets in a single bound.
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Tea Party members go to meetings on Medicare scooters.
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That kind of thing happens to black people every day in this country, and they don't receive that kind of sentence he did, which was to go to prison on the weekends; I think he lectured there-an outside lecturer.
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I used to be a discipline problem, which caused me embarrassment until I realized that being a discipline problem in a racist society is sometimes an honor.
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Dance is the universal art, the common joy of expression. Those who cannot dance are imprisoned in their own ego and cannot live well with other people and the world. They have lost the tune of life. They only live in cold thinking. Their feelings are deeply repressed while they attach themselves forlornly to the earth.
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Dualism:: In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man I am outside of history. I wish i had some peanuts, it looks hungry there in the cage. I am outside of history. Its hungrier than i thot.
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Free enterprise is not a bad idea and has produced art.
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No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.
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Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.