Jesmyn Ward Quotes

By looking into more details of American history, we can make more sense of what's happening today.

Never underestimate how history injects itself into the present.

We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day society.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

History is not the past. History is the present. We carry our history with us.

Poles must understand history but we must also overcome it if it is obstructing our contemporary goals.

The reason that 'Stalingrad' took off was because it emphasized the influence of history on the individual.

I like to show what happens to people in the past and how it affects their present.

I began to feel that, in a sense, we were all prisoners of our own history.

I think Baltimore suffers from nostalgia and it keeps us from being honest in talking about what really happened here. A place doesn't have to be perfect to be beloved, and I love this city and I love it better for seeing its flaws.

I have always felt that this story is universal. When I began to understand the details of the history, I felt that the most compelling aspect was not what happened, but what continues to happen and how it is denied.

Jewish persecution is a historical memory of the present generation and people fear it in the present day, and that's why those references are so much more powerful. I just understand that better now.

When I began 'All Our Names,' I did so wanting to create parallel narratives between Africa in the nineteen-seventies and America during that same period.

There's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

In one sense, the stories I read betrayed me. Too few gave me back my mirror image. Fewer still spoke to, or acknowledged, the existence of the problems I faced as a black foster child from a dysfunctional and badly broken home.

Food might be more immediately important than history but if you don't understand what's been done to you - by your own people and the so-called 'they' - you can never get around it.

All my life I believed I became an athlete through my own determination, but it's impossible to think that being descended from slaves hasn't left an imprint through the generations.

A lot of people may not read the history of their own country, but they carry on memories transmitted by previous generations. They're trying to achieve something, [they] have their mission and anger -- all this is fed by past experience of history.

Whoever may be benefited by the results of this war, it will not be the present generation of negroes.

Our history is responsible for the differences in the South African way of life.

I'm all for philosophical debates about race, but if you look at history, you see that the status quo has power when it's unchallenged. So these conversations about inequality are crucial.

And if you want to make many of our black leaders angry, just tell them that racism is not the number problem that black Americans face.

The principal challenge of the next phase of the Negro revolution is to make certain that equality of results will now follow. If we do not, there will be no social peace in the United States for generations.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.