Ntozake Shange Quotes

Author Image

Ntozake Shange

Profession : Playwright

Birth : October 18, 1948

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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 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

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

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