Ross Gay Quotes

'Beloved' is a book that makes me cry.

Ellison was prominent on the lecture circuit even in the Black Aesthetic days of the Sixties when his defiantly pro-American and prickly-proud intellectual act met with some hostility.

You have a plantation where you have 10 white people and you have about 50 or 60 black people. The automatic thought was, 'Why didn't they raise up? Why didn't they overpower? They had the numbers.' But really these people, their hope was broken. Their sense of love was broken. Their appreciation for who they were was broken.

I often compare my method of working to that of a well-meaning freed woman in a Northern state who is attempting to delineate the horrors of Southern slavery but with next to no resources, other than some paper and a pen knife and some people she'd like to kill

You have to start with slavery because those abuses have never been eradicated. You know, people are not living in slums because they voted to. You know, their children are not in jail because they wanted them to. You know, these are the results of a people who have been oppressed and suffer national oppression, you know.

All American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.

Me and discrimination, me and racial profiling... we go way back. We've got history.

I've known that people were racist and misogynistic and homophobic since I was very little.

I read 'Song of Solomon' by Toni Morrison in college, and it just blew my mind.

Growing up as Chinese-American, as someone who experienced racism, questions of 'otherness' are always at the forefront of my mind.

Of course I've felt racism.

America is the big subject of the second half of the 20th century, tackled in one form or another by all the great American male writers. You could make a case for saying that it was the only game in town - from Bellow to Roth to Updike to Richard Ford - America was more or less explicitly the leitmotif.

Any time a black person has the audacity to tell everybody else that they're also human beings, they are confronted with all kinds of malice and violence and ill will. It's been that way since black people were brought to this country.

I remember going to a theater once, and there was a stairway that wound its way out to the back. And I was very young, a small child, and I said to my mom, 'Why are those people going up those stairs?' And she said, 'You know, I don't know how to tell you this, I don't know how to explain it, but it won't always be that way, because it's wrong.'

Nothing is worse than a Yankee telling a Southerner that his monuments don't matter.

There are a lot of leaders that talk about ending things like oppression - whether it's discrimination or getting a job - but the reason for all of this stuff is somebody's making a profit off our backs. That's the reason why black people were brought here in the first place. It was a profit motive.

I think that James Baldwin is, for sure, one of the most important American writer/thinkers of his time... not just African-American. He singled-handedly revolutionized the political, artistic, and historical discourses about America.

As a person of color, I feel like I'm socialized to feel like a remnant of poverty or something primitive, and I don't feel like that at all. I can be myself and be me.

It's less to do about me - 'Hey, I'm black and it hurts my feelings; it's a symbol of slavery and oppression' - and more to do with the fact that, as an American, I will not honor a group of treacherous traitors. That's why I despise the rebel flag.

That was worse than stealing, you know, talking back to a white person.

Frederick Douglass had charged the air with rebellion and redemption, and these in turn had supported him in the heat of abolitionism. But the atmosphere changed to one of repression after the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

I can't think of the last Asian that I ran into that talked about internment camps. But black people always want to talk to me about slavery.

Very early on in the process of trying to sell 'The Summer Prince,' I was told, 'Slavery seems to be very important to this society - is that on purpose?' Well, duh.

There is - and always will be - the legacy of chattel slavery in this nation, an obsession with racial and gender differences, but I think that, at its best, this nation is capable of creating standards for itself and reaching towards those standards.

The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality.