Ernest J. Gaines

“I think it's God that makes people care for people, Jefferson. I think it's God makes children play and people sing. I believe it's God that brings loved ones together. I believe it's God that makes trees bud and food grow out of the earth.”

“Do I know what a man is ? Do I know how a man is supposed to die ? I’m still trying to find out how a man should live. Am I supposed to tell someone how to die who has never lived ?”

“Anytime a child is born, the old people look in his face and ask him if he's the One.”

“Sometimes you got to hurt something to help something. Sometimes you have to plow under one thing in order for something else to grow.”

“How do people come up with a date and a time to take life from another man? Who made them God?”

“I tried to decide just how I should respond to them. Whether I should act like the teacher that I was, or like the nigger that I was supposed to be.”

“Only when the mind is free has the body a chance to be free. Yes, they must believe, they must believe. Because I know what it means to be a slave. I am a slave.”

“I have no more to say except this: We must live with our own conscience.”

“You've got to bend with the wind or you're broken.”

“I like the sound of people's voices, and I think what a man says can very well tell what he's thinking, whether he's lying or not.”

“Writing is too goddamned hard for me to think about a soul in teh world ... I don't think about a soul, but just try to get those goddamned characters to act right.”

“We've only been living in these ghettos for seventy-five years or so, but the other three hundred years -- I think this is worth writing about. I think we've made tremendous sacrifices, we've shown tremendous strength. In the ghetto you see a lot of frustration; you see very little strength.”

“I hope when I die, they won't put on my tombstone, 'He wrote Miss Jane Pittman.' Put anything else, but don't put just that. ”

“...my heart may have been in it but my soul was not.”

“The artist must be like a heart surgeon. He must approach something with sympathy, but with a sort of coldness and work and work until he finds some kind of perfection in his work. You can't have blood splashing all over the place. Things must be done very cleanly.”

“Well, in San Francisco if someone's against you, they know how to vote you out of an area. If someone's against you in Louisiana, or if I wrote a book and they did not like it or me in Louisiana, they might shoot me anytime.”

“Everything's been said, but it needs saying again.”

“I don't care what a man is. I mean, a great artist is like a great doctor. I don't care how racist he is. If he can show me how to operate on a heart so that I can cure a brother, or cure someone else, I don't give a damn what the man thinks; he has taught me something. And that is valuable to me. And that is valuable to others and man as a whole. ”

“Irene and my aunt want from me what Miss Emma wants from Jefferson,' I said. 'I don't know if Miss Emma ever had anybody in her past that she could be proud of. Possibly - maybe not. But she wants that now, and she wants it from him. Irene and my aunt want it from me. Miss Emma knows that the state of Louisiana is about to take his life, but before that happens she wants something to remember him by. Irene and my aunt know that one day I will leave them, but they are not about to let me go without a fight. It's the same thing, the very same thing. Miss Emma needs a memory. Do you want she told me when I sat on the bed? That Reverend Ambrose and I should get along, and together - together - we should try and reach Jefferson. Why not the soul? No, she wants memories, memories of him standing like a man.”

“Nietzsche said without music, life would be a mistake. To me, without books, life would be a mistake.”

“I want you to show them the difference between what they think you are and what you can be.”

“And that's all we are Jefferson, all of us on this earth, a piece of drifting wood. until we - each of us, individually- decide to become something else. I am still that piece of drifting wood, and those out there are no better. But you can be better. ”

“There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.”

“He told us that most of us would die violently, and those who did not would be brought down to the level of beasts.”