106 Black Books Quotes

Following is our list of black books quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about black culture.

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Famous Black Books Quotes

Black Books adheres to a more old fashioned, traditional sitcom format, which I think works, because in its own way, it's quite theatrical. — Dylan Moran

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. — Virginia Woolf

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. — Gilbert Highet

Books are the mirrors of the soul. — Virginia Woolf

Books may well be the only true magic. — Alice Hoffman

Bookshops are infested with ideas. Books are quivering, murmuring creatures. — Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Books succeed, and lives fail. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Books, Cats, Life is Good. — Edward Gorey

Books that distribute things... with as daring a freedom as we use in dreams, put us on our feet again. — Marsilio Ficino

Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen. — Joineriana

Books are humanity in print. — Barbara Tuchman

A book calls for pen, ink, and a writing desk; today the rule is that pen, ink, and a writing desk call for a book. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait. — Anatole Broyard

A bookshop is powder-magazine, a dynamite-shed, a drugstore of poisons, a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens. — John Cowper Powys

A library book, I imagine, is a happy book. — Cornelia Funke

Short Black Books Quotes

  • All books are either dreams or swords, you can cut, or you can drug, with words. — Amy Lowell
  • It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books. — Jo Walton
  • A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him — Walter Mosley
  • At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity. — E. M. Forster
  • Books and harlots have their quarrels in public. — Walter Benjamin
  • Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. — Henry Ward Beecher
Black books quote There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people's book and write your ow
There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people's book and write your own.

Black Art Quotes

The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat. — Confucius

The black artist is dangerous. Black art controls the 'Negro's' reality, negates negative influences, and creates positive images. — Sonia Sanchez

Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization. - Federico Garcia Lorca

Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization. — Federico Garcia Lorca

Black books quote Life is like a piano, the white keys represent happiness and the black shows sadness, but as you go
Life is like a piano, the white keys represent happiness and the black shows sadness, but as you go through life's journey, remember that the black keys also makes music.

Of those who start TaeKwonDo training, only about 5% stick with it until they achieve the Black Belt Rank. Then perhaps 80% of those who earn a Black stop there. — Duk Sung Son

A black belt only covers two inches of your ass. You have to cover the rest. — Royce Gracie

Black and white is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive... Black and white is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality. — Roger Ballen

Black books quote There comes a day when you realize turning the page is the best feeling in the world, because you re
There comes a day when you realize turning the page is the best feeling in the world, because you realize there is so much more to the book than the page you were stuck on.

Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts -- a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments. — Henry David Thoreau

Considering the current sad state of our computer programs, software development is clearly still a black art, and cannot yet be called an engineering discipline. — William J. Clinton

In this perilous world, if a black boy wanted to live a halfway normal life and die a natural death he had to learn early the art of how to get along with white folks. — Benjamin E. Mays

Some people never learn the art of compromise. Everything is either black or white. They do no recognize, or will not concede, that the equally important color gray is a mixture of black and white. — Waite Phillips

Black Culture Quotes

If white privilege is a thing, why are people working so hard to be black? All of the award shows and cultural events favor black culture. — Milo Yiannopoulos

Violence is black children going to school for 12 years and receiving 6 years' worth of education. — Julian Bond

I say violence is necessary. Violence is a part of America's culture. It is as American as cherry pie. Americans taught the black people to be violent. We will use that violence to rid ourselves of oppression if necessary. We will be free, by any means necessary. — H. Rap Brown

Black books quote Each time you read a book, a tree smiles knowing there's life after death.
Each time you read a book, a tree smiles knowing there's life after death.

How you act, walk, look and talk is all part of Hip Hop culture. And the music is colorless. Hip Hop music is made from Black, brown, yellow, red and white. — Afrika Bambaataa

I am America. I am the part you won't recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me. — Muhammad Ali

I do not feel inhibited or bound by what I am. That does not mean that I have never had bad scenes relating to being Black and/or a woman, it means that other people’s craziness has not managed to make me crazy. — Lucille Clifton

Black books quote The book to read is not the one that thinks for you but the one which makes you think.
The book to read is not the one that thinks for you but the one which makes you think.

The equilibrium you admire in me is an unstable one, difficult to maintain. My inner life was split early between the call of the Ancestors and the call of Europe, between the exigencies of black-African culture and those of modern life. — Leopold Sedar Senghor

We have to realize our black heritage in order to give us strength to move on and progress. But as far as returning to the old African culture, it's unnecessary and it's not advantageous in many respects. We believe that culture itself will not liberate us. We're going to need some stronger stuff. — Huey Newton

Teach the student what needs to be taught. 'Cause black and white kids both take shorts When one doesn't know about the other one's culture, Ignorance swoops down like a vulture. — KRS-One

There's one more thing I want to say. It's a touchy subject. Black beauty. Black sensuality. We live in a culture where the beauty of black people isn't always as celebrated as other types. I'd like to help change that if I can! — Jody Watley

Color Black Quotes

The United States has been called the melting pot of the world. But it seems to me that the colored man either missed getting into the pot or he got melted down. — Thurgood Marshall

If blacks were given the right to vote, that would place every splay-footed, bandy-shanked, hump-backed, thick-lipped, flat-nosed, woolly-headed, ebon-colored in the country upon an equality with the poor white man. — Andrew Johnson

The Bureau of Justice reports that one in three black male babies born this century will go to jail or prison - that is an absolutely astonishing statistic. And it ought to be terrorizing to not just to people of color, but to all of us. — Bryan Stevenson

Black books quote You dont have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
You dont have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Nobody wants to know a colored woman's opinion about her own status of that of her group. When she dares express it, no matter how mild or tactful it may be, it is called 'propaganda,' or is labeled 'controversial.' Those two words have come to have a very ominous sound to me. — Mary Church Terrell

I tend to think having that extreme of color, that kind of black, is amazingly beautiful...and powerful. What I was thinking to do with my image was to reclaim the image of blackness as an emblem of power. — Kerry James Marshall

I dreamt that I could paint you with words, but there were no colors bright enough, black or white enough, blue or green enough...they didn't mean enough — Mos Def

Black books quote I went away in my head, into a book.
I went away in my head, into a book.

Rays were blazing through the atmosphere of the earth, the horizon became bright orange, gradually passing into all the colors of the rainbow: from light blue to dark blue, to violet and then to black. What an indescribable gamut of colors! Just like the paintings of the artist Nicholas Roerich. — Yuri Gagarin

When you write a song, most of the words you use are in black and white, and then, from time to time, you use one that’s in color. These words in color are a part of ourselves, because we give them a meaning. If you like, we give them a third dimension. — Jacques Brel

One very important difference between color and monochromatic photography is this: in black and white you suggest; in color you state. Much can be implied by suggestion, but statement demands certainty... absolute certainty. — Paul Outerbridge

Black is not sad. Bright colours are what depress me. They're so... empty. Black is poetic. How do you imagine a poet? In a bright yellow jacket? Probably not. — Ann Demeulemeester

Black Movie Quotes

We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are. — J. K. Rowling

When Kubrick decided to go the black comedy route with his movie, he thought of me to give it that flavor. — Terry Southern

I miss my Dad. My Dad loved cheesy monster movies, so we'd have Godzilla movie marathons. Those are some of my favorite memories, laughing at how the monster outfits were so bad, like black garbage bags for heads. — Ahmet Zappa

Black books quote A book is a dream that you hold in your hand.
A book is a dream that you hold in your hand.

One of the things I have an allergic reaction to playing, especially as a black actor, is the mandatory kind of best friend/cop/detective type. You will never see me in that movie. — David Oyelowo

I really wish Hollywood would stop labeling movies, especially movies with predominantly black casts. Then, it makes others feel like, "Oh, well, that's not for me." At the end of the day, everybody understands love, loss, pain and heartbreak. That's not a color. — Taraji P. Henson

You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. — Sayings

Black books quote WIth freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy.
WIth freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy.

Why does every black person in the movies have to play a servant? How about a black person walking up the steps of a courthouse carrying a briefcase? — Myrna Loy

I've always considered movies evil; the day that cinema was invented was a black day for mankind. — Kenneth Anger

I've been identified with pink throughout my career, but I'm not as crazy about it as I've led people to believe. My favorite colors are actually neutrals — black and white — but then who thinks of a movie queen in black and white? Everything has to be in living color. — Sayings

It's always hard when you're playing someone for a lot of people out there who are going to see the movie after reading the books. There's a communion between a reader and the writer, so people will have an idea who Sirius Black is and I might not be everyone's idea of that. — Gary Oldman

People Writing About Black Books

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf
quotes on writing, love and life

794 5571
Read quotes by Dylan Moran

Dylan Moran
quotes on love, life and germany

164 660
Read quotes by Gilbert Highet

Gilbert Highet
quotes on education, society and religion

36 272
Read quotes by Alice Hoffman

Alice Hoffman
quotes on life, education and friendship

237 933
Read quotes by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
quotes on love

256 1889
Read quotes by Edward Gorey

Edward Gorey
quotes on love, death and life

49 155

More Black Books Quotes

White America has seen to it that Black history has been suppressed in schools and in American history books. The bravery of hundreds of our ancestors who took part in slave rebellions has been lost in the mists of time, since plantation owners did their best to prevent any written accounts of uprisings. — Huey Newton

As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them. — Maya Angelou

If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, "There lived a great people-a black people-who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization. — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Add a drop of lavender to milk, leave town with an orange, and pretend you're laughing at it. — Bill Bailey

Like books and black lives - albums still matter. Tonight and always. — Prince

Only the ship is made of books, its sails thousands of overlapping pages, and the sea it floats upon is dark black ink. — Erin Morgenstern

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention. — William S. Burroughs

One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves. — Diane Wakoski

I always order the banned books from a black market dealer in California, figuring if the State of Mississippi banned them, they must be good. — Kathryn Stockett

All the other books ask, 'What's it like?' What was World War II like for the young kid at Normandy, or what is work like for a woman having a job for the first time in her life? What's it like to be black or white? — Studs Terkel

The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws. We regard the minimum wage law as one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books. — Milton Friedman

The best candy shop a child can be left alone in, is the library — Maya Angelou

You know, just sometimes, in between the first cigarette with coffee in the morning to that four hundredth glass of cornershop piss at 3am, you do sometimes look at yourself and think...This is fantastic. I'm in heaven. — Dylan Moran

But when I do book signings and personal appearances, the audiences are mostly white. Growing up here, I expected that and understand it. Black audiences won't come out for a white writer for the most part. It really is just a fact of life. — George Pelecanos

Life is just like a book. Only after you've read it do you know how it ends. It is when we are at the end of life that we know how our life ran. Mine, until now, has been black. As black as my skin. Black as the garbage dump where I live. — Carolina Maria de Jesus

Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books." You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I'm not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man. — Malcolm X

Once upon a time a Georgian printed a couple of books that attracted notice, but immediately it turned out that he was little more than an amanuensis for the local blacks--that his works were really the products, not of white Georgia, but of black Georgia. Writing afterward as a white man, he swiftly subsided into the fifth rank. — Joel Chandler Harris

Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow. In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black. — Erik Larson

Even God had a Welsh name : He spoke to him in the old language; He was to have a peculiar care For the Welsh people. History showed us He was too big to be nailed to the wall Of a stone chapel, yet still we crammed him Between the boards of a black book . — R. S. Thomas

And no book gives a deeper insight into the inner life of the Negro, his struggles and his aspirations, than, The Souls of Black Folk. — Ray Stannard Baker

Now everything that you do is written in red or black in Angel Gabriel's book. Not for everyone is this record kept, but only for those who have taken a position of responsibility. There is a Law of Sins, and if you do not fulfil all your obligations, you will pay. — G. I. Gurdjieff

The Lord has never indicated that black skin came because of being less faithful. Now, the Indian; we know why he has changed, don't we? The Book of Mormon tells us that; and he has a dark skin, but he has promise there that through faithfulness, that they all again become a white and delightsome people. — LeGrand Richards

Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background, the countless minor scenes and interiors of the secession war; and it is best they should not. The real war will never get in the books. — Walt Whitman

You know you're getting old when all the names in your black book have M. D. after them. — Arnold Palmer

One is never alone with a book nearby, don't you agree? Every page reminds us of a day that has passed and makes us relive the emotions that filled it. Happy hours underlined in red pencil, dark ones in black. — Arturo Pérez-Reverte

My dream is to put together a performance of the evolution of black music with Cirque du Soleil . I would also like to do street opera and children's books. But even as I work toward these things, I want to simplify my life. — Quincy Jones

So, the kind of precious memories about being black for my generation won't exist for my kids' and grandkids' generations unless we preserve them through fiction, through film, through comic books, and every other form of media we can possibly utilize to perpetuate the story of the great African-American people. — Henry Louis Gates

Lords, I protest my soul is full of woe That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow. Come, mourn with me for what I do lament, And put sullen black incontinent. I'll make a voyage to the Holy Land To wash this blood off from my guilty hand. March sadly after. Grace my mournings here In weeping after this untimely bier. — William Shakespeare

Books were my pass to personal freedom. — Oprah Winfrey

One day I gave Clifford a bath. And I combed his hair and took hom to the dog show. I'd like to say Clifford won first prize...but he didn't. I don't care. You can keep all your small dogs. You can keep all your black, white, brown, and spotted dogs. I'll keep Clifford...Wouldn't you? — Norman Bridwell

I already optioned a book called The Personal History of Rachel DuPree. I also like The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill. And I love all of Octavia Butler's books. She's created some very complicated black heroines with a variety of belief systems. There are many great books out there, but those are a few of the ones that stand out. — Viola Davis

We understand a person with problems, someone who is wrong about a lot of things in his or her life, who makes messes. We don't understand someone who is constantly right, who is only felled by Kryptonite. Chuck Klosterman had a pretty great book about this whole thing - I Wear The Black Hat - that came out last year and which I greatly enjoyed. — Tod Goldberg

You know what you are? You're a beard with an idiot hanging off it. — Dylan Moran

A reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure until he knows whether the writer of it be a black man or a fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor. — Joseph Addison

We need to eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. — Barack Obama

But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. — Sergey Brin

I peeked up at him one more time, and regretted it. He was glaring down at me again, his black eyes full of revulsion. As I flinched away from him, shrinking against my chair, the phrase if looks could kill suddenly ran through my mind. — Stephenie Meyer

A book unopened alters not the ink on it's pages — J.R. Ward

That is another theme in the book [Dreams from My Father]. How do we exercise more empathy in our public discourse? How do we get the black to see through the eyes of the white? Or the citizen to see through the eyes of the immigrant? Or the straight to see through the eyes of the gay? That has always been a struggle in our politics. — Barack Obama

I am inspired by great food, theater, books, the beach, black-and-white photography, and great vocalists, like Dianne Reeves, Alice Smith, and Shirley Horn. I am inspired by my mentor Diana Castle, who is guiding me towards a truth and honesty in my life and work that I have always longed for. — Erica Tazel

Reviewing books is all about coziness. It is all of it a kind of caucus race. Women review women, Jewish writers review and praise Jewish writers, blacks review blacks, etc. — Alexander Theroux

At first I read mostly books by Southern authors - black and white - because almost all the people I knew were born and raised in the South, starting with my mother. I remember I got a lot of Erskine Caldwell. — Edward P. Jones

A lot of my books have been that way. My World War II thriller about Sarin gas [Black Cross] was published two months before the Sarin attack in the Japanese subway. There are very weird coincidences out there. And I do have one surefire plot I have not and probably never will write, because of my fear someone will carry it out. — Greg Iles

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