Home > Author > Ishmael Reed
1 " No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons. "
― Ishmael Reed , Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
2 " What is the American fetish about highways?They want to get somewhere, LaBas offers.Because something is after them, Black Herman adds.But what is after them?They are after themselves. They call it destiny. Progress. "
― Ishmael Reed
3 " I had no systematic way of learning but proceeded like a quilt maker, a patch of knowledge here a patch there but lovingly knitted. I would hungrily devour the intellectual scraps and leftovers of the learned. "
― Ishmael Reed , Mumbo Jumbo
4 " Dualism::In Ralph Ellison's Invisible ManI am outside of history. i wish i had some peanuts, it looks hungry there in the cage.i am outside of history. its hungrier than i thot. "
― Ishmael Reed , New and Collected Poems, 1964-2006
5 " All art must be for the end of liberating the masses. A landscape is only good when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree. "
6 " Fear stalks the land. (As usual; so what else is new?) "
7 " America is the smart-aleck adolescent who’s “been around” and has his own hot rod. "
8 " the Thing has stirred in its moorings. The Thing that my Grandfather Harry and his generation of Harrys had thought was nothing but a false alarm. "
9 " Yes. You see, it’s not 1 of those germs that break bleed suck gnaw or devour. It’s nothing we can bring into focus or categorize; once we call it 1 thing it forms into something else. "
10 " He said he felt like the gut heart and lungs of Africa’s interior. He said he felt like the Kongo: “Land of the Panther.” He said he felt like “deserting his master,” as the Kongo is “prone to do.” He said he felt he could dance on a dime. "
11 " Dance is the universal art, the common joy of expression. Those who cannot dance are imprisoned in their own ego and cannot live well with other people and the world. They have lost the tune of life. They only live in cold thinking. Their feelings are deeply repressed while they attach themselves forlornly to the earth. "
12 " Time is a pendulum. Not a river. More akin to what goes around comes around. "
13 " I think that when people like you , Mr. Von Vampton, say "The Negro Experience" you are saying that all Negroes experience the world the same way. In that way you can isolate the misfits who would propel them into penetrating the ceiling of this bind you and your assistants have established in this country. The ceiling above which no slave would be allowed to penetrate without stirring the kept bloodhounds. "
14 " To some if you owned your own mind you were indeed sick but when you possessed an Atonist mind you were healthy. A mind which sought to interpret the world by using a single loa. Somewhat like filling a milk bottle with an ocean. "
15 " 61 lynchings occurred in 1920 alone. In 1921, 62, some of the victims, soldiers returning from the Great War who after fighting and winning significant victories - just as they had fought in the Revolutionary and Civil wars and the wars again the Indians - thought that America would repay them for the generosity of putting their lives on the line, for aiding in salvaging their hides from the Kaiser who had been tagged "enemy" this time. Instead, a Protestant country ignorant even of Western mysteries executes soldiers after a manner of punishments dealt to witches in the "Middle Ages." Europe and the Catholic Church are horrified but not surprised at this "tough guy" across the waters whose horrendous murders in Salem led Europe to reform its "witch laws. "
16 " He is summoned and asked to swear upon the only book the judge will allow in "his court." PaPa LaBas won't dare touch the accursed thing. He demands the right to his own idols and books. It reminds PaPa LaBas of the familiar epigram: "Orthodoxy is my Doxy, Heterodoxy is the other fellow's Doxy. "
17 " Whenever sophistry and rhetoric fail they send in their poor White goons. They don't have the guts of real gangsters. The letters after their names are their tommy guns and those universities where they pour over syllables in the many cubicles, their Big House. "
18 " Have you ever seen people line up outside a Van Gogh exhibit? When they get inside there are so many they can't even see the paintings, they just pass by like sheep or like mourners passing the tomb of a fallen hero, a bier, with the same solemnity. And the extent of their knowledge concerning Van Gogh is that he "cut off his ear." Man, it's religion they make it into. "
19 " A hot mean and bitchy desert with a naturally formed misanthropic mood seemed to be saying well Loop good buddy, how you want it dished up, scorpion bite, rattlesnake, order anything you see. "
20 " Neo-Hoodoo is the 8 basic dances of 19th century New Orleans' Place Congo- the Calinda the Bamboula the Chacta the Babouille the Conjaille the Juba the Congo and the VooDoo- modernized into the Philly Dog, the Hully Gully, the Funky Chicken, the Popcorn, the Boogaloo and the dance of great American choreographer Buddy Bradley. "
