This Week…

“You don’t have to catch every ball that someone throws at you.”
–A friend’s advice over lunch

“Slavery is a memory of something we cannot remember, and yet we cannot forget.”
—Bill T. Jones

“There is a strange emptiness to life without myths.”
–N.K. Jemisin

“Whose little boy are you?”
–James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.”
–Toni Morrison

“No time to marry, no time to settle down; I’m a young woman, and I ain’t done runnin’ around.”
–Bessie Smith

“Man, if you gotta ask you’ll never know.”
–Louis (Satchmo) Armstrong

“I never thought of losing, but now that it’s happened, the only thing is to do it right. That’s my obligation to all the people who believe in me. We all have to take defeats in life.”
–Muhammad Ali

“I’ve done movies for certain reasons; I did ‘Anaconda’ because the black man lives. Simple. The black man isn’t dead in the first three pages, like Jurassic Park. It’s like, ‘The black man kills the snake with a Latino girl? Damn! I got to do this.'”
–Ice Cube

“I don’t think about art while I work. I try to think about life.”
–Jean-Michel Basquiat