Top 51 Quotes & Sayings by Ntozake Shange

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American playwright Ntozake Shange.

Last updated on September 17, 2024.

Ntozake Shange was an American playwright and poet. As a Black feminist, she addressed issues relating to race and Black power in much of her work. She is best known for her Obie Award-winning play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. She also penned novels including Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), Liliane (1994), and Betsey Brown (1985), about an African-American girl run away from home. Among Shange's honors and awards were fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund, a Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a Pushcart Prize. In April 2016, Barnard College announced that it had acquired Shange's archive. She lived in Brooklyn, New York. Shange had one daughter, Savannah Shange. Shange was married twice: to the saxophonist David Murray and the painter McArthur Binion, Savannah's father, with both marriages ending in divorce.

American - Playwright | Born: October 18, 1948

Source: Wikipedia

I was constantly being sought after for money. And the vitriol that came my way from many who felt threatened by controversial aspects of 'for colored girls' was often frightening.

Ntozake Shange

I've still got my characters in my head, and I can still hear them. When I go to the grocery store, I hear them.

Ntozake Shange

I had - there were three strokes, and I lost my ability to read and write and speak, and it really put me by the wayside for a number of years.

Ntozake Shange

I'm a firm believer that language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives and other people's lives.

Ntozake Shange

I think art is a healing force, and if we give in to the joy that can be found in art, then we are able to sustain ourselves in spite of ourselves.

Ntozake Shange

White people use their literature to maintain culture. That's why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.

Ntozake Shange

I was chastised for writing several obituaries for Malcolm X, exploring different aspects of his writing. One teacher in particular told me, didn't I think I was beating a dead horse? and dismissively threw my paper on my desk.

Ntozake Shange

I never intended to go to Broadway. I was very happy being in an Off Broadway theater and having an Off Broadway life. What it did to me is try to fit a round peg - that's me - into a whole bunch of square buildings. I just didn't fit.

Ntozake Shange

Multiculturalism is a white people joke.

Ntozake Shange

If anything is life-changing, being the descendant of a slave is.

Ntozake Shange

Luckily, my father and my mother liked us to talk, so they encouraged us to talk, so that the girls in my house, they're all very powerful speakers and powerful agents of their own will, as is my brother.

Ntozake Shange

I remember that my mother used to take me to see ballets, especially if there were black people in them.

Ntozake Shange

Multiculturalism isn't about culture, it's about power.

Ntozake Shange

My characters don't talk necessarily in a normal American way of talking. They talk a little different.

Ntozake Shange

It still amazes and fascinates me that women of color have kept my work alive for these many generations.

Ntozake Shange

My family moved around a lot, so I don't have any friends that I had all my life, but I did have annual trips back to Queens.

Ntozake Shange

Before I went to college, I went to the S.N.C.C. office three times a week to offer my services and catch up on my 'Liberator' magazine. The other two days, I went to the Lycee Francais to keep my French crisp. I felt comfortable in the diversity of my worlds.

Ntozake Shange

I hadn't published a book of poetry in over a decade because I've been very ill. As I got better and started to write, I said, 'Wow, even as an old woman, I could have a selected book of poems.'

Ntozake Shange

Spell-check ruins my work. It fixes all my slang and dialect into standard English. So I'm caught in a tangle of technology that feels very foreign to me.

Ntozake Shange

Sisterhood is important because we are all we have to stand on. We have to stand near and by each other, pray for one another, and share the joys and the difficulties that women face in the world today. If we don't talk about it among ourselves, then we are made silent by the patriarchy, and that serves us no purpose.

Ntozake Shange

There was quite a ruckus about the seven ladies in their simple colored dresses. I was truly dumbfounded that I was, right then and there, deemed the biggest threat to black men since cotton pickin', and not all women were in my corner, either.

Ntozake Shange

When I die, I will not be guilty of having left a generation of girls behind thinking that anyone can tend to their emotional health other than themselves.

Ntozake Shange

I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager... and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that.

Ntozake Shange

I write for young girls of color, for girls who don't even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive. I can only change how they live, not how they think.

Ntozake Shange

There was nothing to aspire to, no one to honor. Sojourner Truth wasn't a big enough role model for me. I couldn't go around abolishing slavery.

Ntozake Shange

Art gives us the opportunity to have clarity as well as hope that we might be able to survive a situation, or hope that we can find a way out of it without too much more injury to ourselves.

Ntozake Shange

Novels allow me to create a whole world.

Ntozake Shange

I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager. . .and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that. . .

Ntozake Shange

And this is for Colored girls who have considered suicide, but are moving to the ends of their own rainbows.

Ntozake Shange

nice is such a rip-off.

Ntozake Shange

I write for young girls of color, for girls who don’t even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive. I can only change how they live, not how they think.

Ntozake Shange

i found god in myself and i loved her i loved her fiercely

Ntozake Shange

I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.

Ntozake Shange

When I die, I will no be guilty of having left a generation of girls behind thinking that anyone can tend to their emotional health other than themselves.

Ntozake Shange

in our ordinaryness we are most bizarre.

Ntozake Shange

Right now being born a girl is to be born threatened.

Ntozake Shange

I'm committed to the idea that one of the few things human beings have to offer is the richness of unconscious and conscious emotional responses to being alive. ... The kind of esteem that's given to brightness/smartness obliterates average people or slow learners from participating fully in human life, particularly technical and intellectual life. But you cannot exclude any human being from emotional participation.

Ntozake Shange

our dreams draw blood from old sores.

Ntozake Shange

Where there is a woman there is magic.

Ntozake Shange

one thing I don’t need is any more apologies i got sorry greetin me at my front door you can keep yrs i don’t know what to do wit em they don’t open doors or bring the sun back they don’t make me happy or get a mornin paper didn’t nobody stop usin my tears to wash cars cuz a sorry.

Ntozake Shange

When words & manners leave you no space for yourself make very personal very clear & your obstructions will join you or disappear.

Ntozake Shange

i usedta live in the world really be in the world free & sweet talkin good mornin & thank-you & nice day uh huh i cant now i cant be nice to nobody nice is such a rip-off regular beauty & a smile in the street is just a set-up

Ntozake Shange

Our society allows people to be absolutely neurotic and totally out of touch with their feelings and everyone else's feelings, and yet be very respectable.

Ntozake Shange

I've never thought of leaving the South, never.

Ntozake Shange

I am gonna write poems til i die and when i have gotten outta this body i am gonna hang round in the wind and knock over everybody who got their feet on the ground.

Ntozake Shange

Creation is everything you do. Make something.

Ntozake Shange

somebody/ anybody sing a black girl's song bring her out to know herself to know you but sing her rhythms carin/ struggle/ hard times sing her song of life she's been dead so long closed in silence so long she doesn't know the sound of her own voice her infinite beauty she's half-notes scattered without rhythm/ no tune sing her sighs sing the song of her possibilities sing a righteous gospel let her be born let her be born & handled warmly.

Ntozake Shange

Where there is a woman there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits.

Ntozake Shange

The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.

Ntozake Shange

my spirit is too ancient to understand the separation of soul & gender

Ntozake Shange

Being alive and being a woman is all I got, but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't conquered yet.

Ntozake Shange