I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don't understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song.
Bernice Johnson ReagonRead
Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are.
Interpretation
Challenges in life are meant for personal growth and self-discovery rather than causing fear or inaction.
This quote emphasizes that the difficulties and obstacles we encounter in life serve a greater purpose; they are opportunities for growth and a means to learn about ourselves. Instead of allowing challenges to overwhelm us, we should view them as valuable experiences that contribute to our understanding of who we are and what we are capable of achieving.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming life's obstacles.
I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don't understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song.
When the culture is strong, you've got this consistency where black people can grow up in these places with this voice just resonating about our special-ness in the universe. And I always say you're in trouble if you get too far away from that core that grounds you.
The voice I have now, I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got out of jail... and I'd never heard it before in my life.
Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I lay me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be: Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.
Be a half-assed crusader, a part-time fanatic. Don't worry to much about the fate of the world. Saving the world is only a hobby. Get out there and enjoy the world, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, husbands wives; climb mountains, run rivers, get drunk, do whatever you want to do while you can, before it's too late.
My mother wanted me to join the Indian army, as the army was seen as a decent and respectable career to have. I shocked my mother by telling her that I wanted to be a writer.
You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.
I mourn my old life here. We barely scraped by, but I knew where I fit in, I knew what my place was in the tightly interwoven fabric that was our life. I wish I could go back to it because, in retrospect, it seems so secure compared to now, when I am so rich and famous and so hated by the authorities in the capitol.
It was then that Hook bit him. Not the pain of this but its unfairness was what dazed Peter. It made him quite helpless. He could only stare, horrified. Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but he will never afterwards be quite the same boy. No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except Peter.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.