Wallace Thurman Quotes

I am reminded again that the greatest phrase ever written is words, words, words.

I cannot bear to associate with the ordinary run of people. I have to surround myself with individuals who for the most part are more than a trifle insane

It was the way of Emma Lou always to create her worlds within her own mind without taking under consideration the fact that other people and other elements, not contained within herself, would also have to aid in their molding.

Perhaps if she were to live with a homey type of family they could introduce her to “the right sort of people.

Beloved, we join hands here to pray for gin. An aridity defiles us. Our innards thirst for the juice of juniper. Something must be done. The drought threatens to destroy us. Surely, God who let manna fall from the heavens so that the holy children of Israel might eat, will not let the equally holy children of Niggeratti Manor die from the want of a little gin. Children, let us pray.

Their motto must be “Whiter and whiter every generation,” until the grandchildren of the blue veins could easily go over into the white race and become assimilated so that problems of race would plague them no more.

At the core of this movement were Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Countee Cullan, Nella Larsen, Jessie Remon Fauset, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps, and Zora Neale Hurston.

I have yet to see an intelligent or middle class American Negro laugh and sing and dance spontaneously.

didn’t matter if you and your parents had been freedmen before the Emancipation Proclamation, nor did it matter that you were almost three-quarters white. You were, nevertheless, classed with those hordes of hungry, ragged, ignorant black folk arriving from the South in such great numbers, packed like so many stampeding cattle in dirty, manure-littered box cars.

But who are doctors that I should heed them?

Thurman believed, however, that racial bigotry would continue in its various manifestations as long as color functioned as a social marker, with the devices for the border patrolling of racialized identities powerfully in place.

A man's complexion has little to do with his talent. He either has it or has it not, and despite the dictates of spiritually starved white sophisticates genius does not automatically descend upon one because one's grandmother happened to be sold down the river "befo' de wah.

You are a civilized man; the racist is not; do not fight with him to grant you your humanity, but laugh at the loss of his; do not admit inferiority in any sense, but claim, directly or indirectly, that you are superior

It is almost incomprehensible to them that the American Negro should share the American white man's prejudice against foreigners, and that he should vigorously resent their intrusion into his community. Another aspect of Harlem little

Educated dark-skinned males often married light-skinned women and had successful professional careers.

He had discovered too that the majority of those Negroes who spent the greater part of their time professing a love of race in one breath, and denouncing whites in another, was, for the most part, insincere and ignorant demagogues, no matter how many Phi Beta Kappa keys they strung across their vests, or how many academic degrees they initialed behind their names. They

They, themselves, adore Negro women, but tolerate Negro men only for appearances' sake.

too busy in this respect to be violently aroused by problems of race unless economic factors precipitated matters.