A Quote by Assata Shakur

When I was a child, if someone had talked to me about buying water, I would have thought it was a joke. — © Assata Shakur
When I was a child, if someone had talked to me about buying water, I would have thought it was a joke.
My dad almost died as a child from water-borne diseases in Ethiopia, and he had talked to me about digging a well in Ethiopia and I thought, I have too many friends and great people in my life that would be concerned with this subject of clean water.
As far as outlining is concerned, I don't outline humor. I might right down a word or two to remind myself of a punch line I thought of, but the actual structure of a piece I really don't. I don't think it would really help me because for me the process is joke, joke, joke, joke.
I had been composing just for myself, and people would say I played so orchestrally, and wondered if I thought about having someone write a piece for me for an orchestra. And I thought, I don't want someone else to write that. You know I finally had made an overhead chart of my drums and what pitches the cymbals and toms were tuned to, and what have you. And I started to compose just with what I had for my solo drumming.
When I began to think deeply about the metaphysics of love I talked with everyone around me about it. I talked to large audiences and even had wee one-on-one conversations with children about the way they think about love. I talked about love in every state, everywhere I traveled.
The interesting thing was we never talked about pottery. Bernard [Leach] talked about social issues; he talked about the world political situation, he talked about the economy, he talked about all kinds of things.
I keep on repeating something told to me by an American psychologist: "When you are making a joke about someone and you are the only one to laugh, it is not a joke. It is a joke only for yourself." If people are making a joke they have the right to laugh at me but I will ignore them. Ignoring doesn't mean that you don't understand. You understand it so much that you don't want to react.
When you're sharing the music, you're not buying the CD. When you're sharing that video, you're not buying the TV. But we thought, really, there'd be a firewall. While near-zero marginal cost would impact virtual goods, we never thought it would move over to the physical world.
He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend's house, a two-year-old child building word patters, like jargon, making pretty sounds in the air.
I had very little fear about it, but basically, my straight friends talked me out of it. I think they thought as I was bisexual, there was no need to. But it's amazing how much more complicated it became because I didn't come out in the early days. I often wonder if my career would have taken a different path if I had.
I'm not allowed to make a joke. It is a bit unfair how I'm treated. I thought it was a joke. I got calls and messages. I would rather not to have to worry about things like that. It is disappointing.
My mother talked about the stories I used to spin as a child of three, before I started school. I would tell this story about what school I went to and what uniform I wore and who I talked to at lunchtime and what I ate, and my mother was like, 'This girl does not even go to school.'
I wouldn't want someone assuming that some negative song has some truth between me and my wife. There was a song that one of my buddies sent me, and it was an awesome song. It was about this woman who had fallen in love with a man that wasn't her husband, and I love everything about the song except for the fact that I personally cannot sing it. It would kill me if someone thought I was singing it about my wife.
It doesn't mean you can't discuss important things, but I would never do a joke about cancer, just because I don't think any joke is funny enough to justify upsetting someone who is going through that.
But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? It wasn't that nothin' would change. Which is what you might think, I suppose. He had to know better'n that. I've thought about it a good deal. . . And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I don't have no intentions of carvin' a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise. I think that's what I would like most of all.
When I had something I thought God was talking to me about, the first thing I did, before I ever talked to the congregation, was to sit down with the major influencers of the church and share with them what I thought God was speaking to me. I gave them time for input or questions. Many times they would ask questions and I would reply, "I need to spend more time on this. I'm not sure I'm thinking clearly there." Other times they added value and helped make this vision better or more accessible to the people.
My wife had a miscarriage. We have rarely talked about it. It did make me more aware of the sanctity of human life, how precious every child is.
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