Quotes about Community

If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.

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.

It was lovely. Not to be stared at, not seen, but being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other.

I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.

The idea of a wanton woman is something I have inserted into almost all of my books. An outlaw figure who is disallowed in the community because of her imagination or activity or status — that kind of anarchic figure has always fascinated me.

When good people take you in and treat you good, you ought to try to be good back.

Nothing in this world loves a black man more than another black man. You hear of solitary white men, but niggers? Can't stay away from one another a whole day. So. It looks to me like you the envy of the world.

And then she knew. Her friends and neighbors were angry at her because she had overstepped, given too much, offended them by excess.

I want to do good work. I want to be involved in other people's doing good work.

Pauline felt uncomfortable with the few black women she met. They were amused by her because she did not straighten her hair. When she tried to make up her face as they did, it came off rather badly. Their goading glances and private snickers at her way of talking (saying "chil'ren") and dressing developed in her a desire for new clothes.

At first the people in the town were frightened; they knew Shadrack was crazy but that did not mean that he didn't have any sense or, even more important, that he had no power. [...] Once the people understood the boundaries and nature of his madness, they could fit him, so to speak, into the scheme of things.

Church is not for spectators.