Jesmyn Ward Quotes

The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race.

Unless you've been touched personally, it's difficult to see, but there are millions of people who have no voice whatsoever.

It is not I who have been consigned to the bedroom of history.

It's hard to think what should make your blood boil more - what happened to Billy Ray or what didn't happen to those who abused him. It's something we can't ignore.

Jews, black people - any people who are hated or who have suffered, either as individuals or as a people - use humour. It is a survival skill.

I can hear the roar of women's silence.

We know enough to stand here in truth - facing pain, cry and suffering of those who were murdered here. Face to face with the victims' families who are here today. Before the judgment of our own conscience.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

My father is the jailhouse. My father is your system... I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you.

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.

To look upon the massacre of our fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers, and if we speak we are called savages ….

Oppression costs the oppressor too much if the oppressed stand up and protest.

No one should ever suffer in silence. Bullies thrive in silence.

I think when you see that the status quo creates pain and anguish and suffering, what I am most afraid of is that things will stay the same.

It is an insult for me to have been alive through the times you are calling the so-called civil rights movement. I don't celebrate my humiliations and my insults.

All of my plays are about people who have been marginalized... erased from the public record.

The problem with Muslim women is less that we cannot speak the language, but that no one listens to us.

What I think I learned from working on 'Moonlight' is you see what happens when you persecute people. They fold into themselves.

I wanted to resist in 'The Look of Silence' making a film that ends with any kind of positive hope I feel in human rights documentaries dealing with human survivors.

We cannot rely upon the silenced to tell us they are suffering.

The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.

Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

The world didn’t like to look at the dark underside very often. But that didn’t change the ugliness; it only ensured that those who perpetuated the ugliness were left alone to kill and maim and rape.

A people who have suffered so much for so long at the hands of a racist society must draw the line somewhere.

Those who suffer most cry out the least.