There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.
Henry Louis GatesRead
My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the importance of storytelling as a way of connecting with and understanding life experiences.
Henry Louis Gates emphasizes the profound impact that stories have on our lives, suggesting that his father valued the narrative of experiences as deeply as the experiences themselves. The quote reveals how storytelling can be a means of living through and understanding life, illustrating the intersection of words and personal experience in a writer's life.
Themes
StoriesExperiencesWritingNarrativeWordsFather
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the influence of parents, you could quote this to emphasize the power of storytelling in shaping identity.
More from Henry Louis Gates
All quotes →It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that.
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In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room - and we have to become sensitive to it.
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In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence.
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The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.
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The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again.
Henry Louis GatesRead
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