Angela James Quotes

Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can, here in Europe, on radio and television—in fact, have just returned from a land, Germany, which was made notorious by a silent majority not so very long ago.

Some of us, white and black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own - which it is - and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

Dad reckons if you have a great time in one place, then that's a good reason for never going back. Nothing will ever measure up to the first time. He laughs at people who go to the same place every year, same beach, same house, same things to do.

She does her hair in an Afro like Cicely Tyson, that famous actress I seen on TV once, or Angela Davis, who I don’t know exactly who she is but they say she’s got guts and ain’t scared of white people.

All that week I listened to Palestinians invoking that tradition, invoking James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, or Angela Davis, explaining how these writers and activists revealed something of their own struggle to them.

It’s a seminal moment in the history of Germany and Europe. Stopping at the Elbe is not a normal military-political decision; it’s one dictated by higher powers. Crossing the Rhine is fine; but the Elbe marks the end of reasonable ambition.

Since novelty is what your brain craves, you’ll be tempted to move on to something new, and that could be what makes the most sense. However, if you want to stay engaged for more than a few years in any endeavor, you’ll need to find a way to enjoy the nuances that only a true aficionado can appreciate. “The old in the new is what claims the attention,” said William James. “The old with a slightly new turn.

I’ve seen every episode of Murder, She Wrote, and I adore Angela Lansbury to pieces. But you’d have to be insane to let Jessica Fletcher within ten yards of your house.

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie * * * If you are interested in the books on these lists, please seek them out at your local independent bookstore. Miigwech! Acknowledgments

thought of James Baldwin’s letter to Angela Davis as she languished in a jail cell forty-eight years ago. “Dear Sister,” he began. “One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But, no, they appear to glory in their chains; now, more than ever, they appear to measure their safety in chains and corpses.

One way of gauging a nation’s health, or of discerning what it really considers to be its interests—or to what extent it can be considered as a nation as distinguished from a coalition of special interests—is to examine those people it elects to represent or protect it.

If we know, and do nothing, we are worse that the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own - which it is - and render impasssable with our bodies the corridor the the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

In December, Angela Lansbury had been signed to play Raymond’s mother, the arch-villainess Eleanor Shaw Iselin. Apparently, Sinatra originally wanted Lucille Ball for the role, a fascinating casting notion, as Tom Santopietro points out: “As Ball aged, she grew into an increasingly hardened performer, losing all traces of the vulnerability that so informed her brilliant multiyear run on television’s I Love Lucy. The resulting quality of toughness would have suited the role of [Eleanor] very well, although it is anyone’s guess whether or not Ball would have felt comfortable delving into the dark recesses of [her] warped character.

Looking at this picture, I am struck by how beautiful my parents were together. James and Angela. I know what it cost them to build a life, to have me. A white woman and a black man in the early ’80s, neither of their families being particularly thrilled with the arrangement. We moved around a lot before my father died, trying to find a neighborhood where my parents felt at ease, at home. My mother didn’t feel welcome in Baldwin Hills. My father didn’t feel comfortable in Brentwood. I was in school before I met another person who looked like me. Her name was Yael. Her father was Dominican, and her mother was from Israel. She liked to play soccer. I liked to play dress-up. We could rarely agree on anything. But I liked that when someone asked her if she was Jewish, she said, “I’m half Jewish.” No one else I knew was half something. For so long, I felt like two halves. And then my father died, and I felt like I was one-half my mother and one-half lost. A half that I feel so torn from, so incomplete without. But looking at this picture now, the three of us together in 1986, me in overalls, my father in a polo, my mother in a denim jacket, we look like we belong together. I don’t look like I am half of one thing and half of another but rather one whole thing, theirs. Loved.

Baldwin penned a powerful open letter to Angela Davis, later published in The New York Review of Books. He famously wrote: “We must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

Looking at this picture, I am struck by how beautiful my parents were together. James and Angela. I know what it cost them to build a life, to have me. A white woman and a black man in the early ’80s, neither of their families being particularly thrilled with the arrangement. We moved around a lot before my father died, trying to find a neighborhood where my parents felt at ease, at home. My mother didn’t feel welcome in Baldwin Hills. My father didn’t feel comfortable in Brentwood

The earliest states, entities that these days feel reassuringly solid but once had to be built from scratch, were faced with a basic problem. They needed to convince people to stay within their geographical boundaries, to not wander off because they did not like the conditions, says American anthropologist James Scott, who has devoted his career to understanding how the first states emerged and the factors that helped them grow. Without a population, states have no power. And this made people the most valuable commodity of all.

In the years after The Fire Next Time, Baldwin openly questioned capitalism—even commending, with Bobby Seale, a “Yankee Doodle”–type socialism. He relentlessly criticized white supremacy, railed against U.S. imperialism, and prophesied the end of the West. In his open letter to Angela Davis in 1970, he succinctly summarized that politics: “We know that we, the blacks, and not only we, the blacks, have been, and are, the victims of a system whose only fuel is greed, whose only god is profit. We know that the fruits of this system have been ignorance, despair, and death, and we know that the system is doomed because the world can no longer afford it—if, indeed, it ever could have….The enormous revolution in black consciousness which has occurred in your generation…means the beginning or the end of America

Near our old apartment in Auburn, there is a trail of trees called the George Bengtson Historic Tree Trail, named after a white research forester and plant physiologist at the University of Auburn, Alabama. A great man, I’m sure. These trees are grafted from scions of heritage trees. Among the trees planted: Lewis & Clark Osage Orange. Trail of Tears Water Oak. General Jackson Black Walnut. General Robert E. Lee Sweetgum. Southern Baldcypress. Johnny Appleseed Apple Tree. Mark Twain Bur Oak. Lewis & Clark Cottonwood. Helen Keller Southern Magnolia. Amelia Earhart Sugar Maple. Chief Logan American Elm. Lincoln’s Tomb White Oak. John F. Kennedy Crabapple. John James Audubon Japanese Magnolia. No trees are named for Muskogee, the First People who died in the millions during epidemics, displacement, and land raids. Under the buildings and homes and replanted forests are remnants of Muskogee earthwork mounds, temples, and trenches, a complex network of pre-American cities. There is a single scion named for a northern Indian Iroquois, Chief Logan, another for the Trail of Tears, the only nod to the suffering of Indigenous people. There is no mention of Sacajawea, never mind that Lewis and Clark would’ve been lost in the American wilderness without her. George Washington Carver Green Ash is the only scion named after the Black inventor and scientist. No Black or Native women or femmes are named. No mention of a single civil rights leader, which Alabama birthed aplenty: Coretta Scott King, Rosa Parks, Angela Y. Davis. Imagine a Zora Neale Hurston Sweetgum or a Margaret Walker Poplar.

It was a real treat when he'd read me Daisy Miller out loud. But we'd reached the point in our relationship when, in a straight choice between him and Henry James, I'd have taken Henry James any day even if Henry James were dead and not much of a one for the girls when living, either.

Angela and Tracy approached with the foliage they’d collected. Silently they started to cover James’ body. Chris, Donna and Billy also fell silent out of respect. For now this was the only burial James would be getting, until they knew for sure whether they were really alone or not. Only when the body was covered did Chris break the silence. He asked, ‘Should we prepare leaves for the rest of us too?

if you keep practicing in the same time and place, what once took conscious thought to initiate becomes automatic. “There is no more miserable human being,” observed William James, than the one for whom “the beginning of every bit of work” must be decided anew each day.

Author and activist James Baldwin once put it this way: “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

There was... a very palpable fear that involving the Scottish Committee of the Arts Council could lead to a more nationalistic festival, like the Scottish Theatre Festival envisaged by Bridie in October 1946. Some members of the Arts Council's Scottish Committee were considered 'too nationalistic and difficult to work with' by the London office.

THE NAP MINISTRY LIBRARY These books have been a quiet storm in my understanding of liberation, rest, and resistance. May they be a collaborator for your lifelong rest pilgrimage. It may take years to truly engage with just one title from this list. Please don’t rush or see this as a reading competition. There is no urgency, only the joy of lifelong rest, study, and research. Why We Can’t Wait Martin Luther King, Jr. A Black Theology of Liberation James Cone Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader edited by Katie Geneva Cannon, Emilie M. Townes, and Angela D. Sims

Laszlo Bock, Work Rules (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2015) David Brooks, The Social Animal (New York: Random House, 2011) Arie de Geus, The Living Company (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2002) Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Perseverance and Passion (New York: Scribner, 2016) Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (New York: Random House, 2012) Amy Edmondson, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Pfeiffer, 2012) Adam Grant, Give and Take (New York: Viking, 2013) Richard Hackman, Leading Teams (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2002) Chip and Dan Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard (New York: Broadway Books, 2010) Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (New York: HarperCollins, 2016) James Kerr, Legacy (London: Constable & Robinson, 2013) Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002) Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World (New York: Portfolio, 2015). Mark Pagel, Wired for Culture (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012) Daniel Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009) Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013) Edgar H. Schein, Helping (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009) Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2013) Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline (New York: Doubleday Business, 1990) Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009)

The experience that Mr. Smith had is a cultural and spiritual experience, that turned out very badly, but, it’s a cultural experience, not a mental illness. He is no more mentally ill than any other belief system that we have that is criticized at times as irrational as well. (quoting Angela Greene, Public Defender)

I’ve seen every episode of Murder, She Wrote, and I adore Angela Lansbury to pieces. But you’d have to be insane to let Jessica Fletcher within ten yards of your house. Talk about harbingers of death.

RECOMMENDED READING Brooks, David. The Road to Character. New York: Random House, 2015. Brown, Peter C., Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014. Damon, William. The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life. New York: Free Press, 2009. Deci, Edward L. with Richard Flaste. Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation. New York: Penguin Group, 1995. Duhigg, Charles. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. New York: Random House, 2012. Dweck, Carol. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House, 2006. Emmons, Robert A. Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007. Ericsson, Anders and Robert Pool. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. Heckman, James J., John Eric Humphries, and Tim Kautz (eds.). The Myth of Achievement Tests: The GED and the Role of Character in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Kaufman, Scott Barry and Carolyn Gregoire. Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind. New York: Perigee, 2015. Lewis, Sarah. The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014. Matthews, Michael D. Head Strong: How Psychology is Revolutionizing War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. McMahon, Darrin M. Divine Fury: A History of Genius. New York: Basic Books, 2013. Mischel, Walter. The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control. New York: Little, Brown, 2014. Oettingen, Gabriele. Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation. New York: Penguin Group, 2014. Pink, Daniel H. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Riverhead Books, 2009. Renninger, K. Ann and Suzanne E. Hidi. The Power of Interest for Motivation and Engagement. New York: Routledge, 2015. Seligman, Martin E. P. Learned Optimism: How To Change Your Mind and Your Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. Steinberg, Laurence. Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. Tetlock, Philip E. and Dan Gardner. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. New York: Crown, 2015. Tough, Paul. How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Willingham, Daniel T. Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009.