Amy Gerstler Quotes
Quotes to Explore
-
From the day of its birth, the anomaly of slavery plagued a nation which asserted the equality of all men, and sought to derive powers of government from the consent of the governed. Within sound of the voices of those who said this lived more than half a million black slaves, forming nearly one-fifth of the population of a new nation.
-
Baseball can be slow in many ways. The action starts with when the pitcher delivers the ball. But the action really starts when the crack of the bat happens.
-
Because of where I come from, I never thought I'd see in my life a black candidate running for President.
-
The man does not beat your head because you got a Cadillac or because you got a Ford; he beats you because you're black!
-
There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.
-
George Bush doesn't care about black people.
-
Black Sabbath invented heavy metal, in my opinion.
-
I think that it's hard enough being an adolescent and wanting so much to fit in with your peers, your schoolmates, and to erase any sign of difference, to be part of the group. And being biracial but also being black in a predominately white school marked me as different.
-
I love to drive in the Black Hills of Wyoming and South Dakota with Mount Rushmore as the central stop.
-
Eddie Conway is central to my first memories. My parents used to take me to, when it was open, the Baltimore city penitentiary to see Eddie Conway - I was talking to my dad about this recently - from the time I might have been one or two years old. I mean, literally, my first memories are of black men in jail, specifically of Eddie Conway.
-
At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good.
-
Like all rice, black rice is great at absorbing flavours, but it's just as happy to act as a satiny bed for a poached egg, say, if you want to keep things simple.
-
Granny beads are what they're called when a grandma works the garden all day - you always see them - they have a handkerchief around their neck with a lot of dust on them, and then the sweat will go down and make these black beads of sweat and dirt around their neck. And that's what they call granny beads.
-
But it is a black man's game, and it will be forever.
-
There's a lot of cruelty going on all the time, and I'm not just talking about inter-human cruelty. I'm talking about whole species becoming extinct, asteroids hitting planets, black holes gobbling up stars.
-
I've been to many countries and watched a number of conflicts or their residue, and I've served in the military.
-
When I look back at what I had to go through in black baseball, I can only marvel at the many black players who stuck it out for years in the Jim Crow leagues because they had nowhere else to go.
-
I never hated hip-hop. It became the new rock and roll. It became the biggest thing that Africans have ever done in the history of the Americas. Hip-hop put more black Americans on than anything before it. It fed more people. It allowed them to diversify into clothing lines and billion-dollar headphone companies.
-
The sad thing is, I never wanted to be Princess Leia - I always wanted to be Han Solo!
-
I think I'm a realist. Which people who don't like me consider to be pessimism. It isn't pessimism at all. If I was a pessimist I wouldn't get up, I wouldn't shave, I wouldn't watch Batman at 7:30 a.m. Pessimists just don't do that sort of thing.
-
In America, mixed-race identity tends to invite both curiosity and suspicion, largely because few have found a way to interrogate it without centering whiteness as the scale by which to evaluate blackness.
-
You never know how a horse will pull until you hook him to a heavy load.
-
Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.
-
I've always liked wearing black. Hats with veils would suit me just fine.
