April 2011
“I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK.”
—Legendary poet Maya Angelou, whose birthday is today and whose collection she donated to our Schomburg Center For Research In Black Culture last year. We did an interview with her at the time for Huffington Post - check it out. And happy birthday, Maya! (via nypl)
It seems that this amazing weekend has opened a window of opportunity for whoever may feel the need to ask a question.... →
vivelavapeur.tumblr.com
….not that I have that many followers anyways. But still, hurry and ask the right question before I sink back into a sea of emotional disorders.
March 2011
“This is the true joy of life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown out on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”
—George Bernard Shaw,1903 (via talkativolive)
“I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (via kindredsmile)
No matter how negative the media might portray Africa, we will never be ashamed of where we came from. Africa is not just a place---it's who we are. Africa has shaped many of us to be the people we are today, both inside and out.
love this blog
“After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked — as I am surprisingly often — why I bother to get up in the morning.”
—
Richard Dawkins, (via luceplace)
Maybe the most annoying and condescending part of religion is assuming that without it, you would simply have no reason to live (or get up in the morning). Its like a heroin addict asking “without Heroin, how do you go on living?” and my answer to both is a resounding *facepalm*.
(via divineirony)
