"Juneteenth" Quotes

Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.

To live with what you are, to be what you are, to know it and accept it and become it – that is a joy beyond measure.

You do not deal with a man who has lost all that he loves and still expect his love to be confined to one spot.

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed.

You can only be free when you realize you belong no place – you belong every place – no place at all.

Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.

People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all.

It's strange how the thought of certain people can make you feel at home wherever you are.