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Lorraine Hansberry
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“Sometimes, I can see the future stretched out in front of me — just as plain as day. The future hanging over there at the edge of my days. Just waiting for me.”
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“Ah, I like the look of packing crates! A household in preparation for a journey! ... Something full of the flow of life, do you understand? Movement, progress ...”
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“Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.”
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“There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing.”
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“Seem like God don't see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams — but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile.”
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“Children see things very well sometimes — and idealists even better.”
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“It is difficult for the American mind to adjust to the realization that the Rhetts and Scarletts were as much monsters as the keepers of Buchenwald — they just dressed more attractively.”
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“Though it be a thrilling and marvellous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so — doubly dynamic — to be young, gifted and black.”
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“Yes ... weep now, darling, weep. Let us both weep. That is the first thing: to let ourselves feel again. ... Then, tomorrow, we shall make something strong of this sorrow.”
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“I happen to believe that most people — and this is where I differ from many of my contemporaries, or at least as they express themselves — I think that virtually every human being is dramatically interesting. Not only is he dramatically interesting, he is a creature of stature whoever he is ...”
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“I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from truthful identity of what is.”
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“Eventually it comes to you: the thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely ...”
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“American straightforwardness is almost as disarming as Americans invariably think it is.”
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“Ball points belong to their age. They make everyone write alike.”
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“I think that the human race does command its own destiny and that that destiny can eventually embrace the stars.”
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“When a man knows that the abstraction ten exists — nothing on earth can stop him from looking for the fact of eleven.”
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“A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men — and people in general.”
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“I think that the glorious thing about the human race is that it does change the world — constantly. The world or 'life' may seem to more often overwhelm the human being's capacity for struggling against being overwhelmed which is remarkable and exhilarating.”
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“The grim possibility is that she who 'hides her brains' will, more than likely, end up with a mate who is only equal to a woman with 'hidden brains' or none at all.”
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“Obviously the most oppressed of any oppressed group will be its women.”
Lorraine Hansberry, U.S. playwright, writer, civil rights worker
(1930 - 1965)
Full name: Lorraine Vivian Hansberry.