Category Archives: Quotes

As every second post on this site is a quote. You’ll find a deep and broad variety of quotes under this category, which overlap with several other tags and categories. Many of the quotes are larded with links for deeper reading on the subject of the quote, or connections between the subject of the quotes and other people, things, or ideas. See the Taxonomies page for more about this category.

Judy Chicago

Posted on March 17, 2023 | Leave a comment

“Judy Chicago originally Judy Cohen: (b.1939) U.S. multimedia artist. She studied at CULA, and in 1970 she adopted the name of her hometown. Motivated by perceived discrimination in the art world and alienation from Western art traditions, she developed the concepts of ‘vaginal iconography’ and ‘central core’ imagery. Her most memorable work, The Dinner Party (1974-79), is a triangular table with place settings for 39 important women represented by ceramic plates with feminine imagery and table runners embellished with embroidery styles typical of their eras. In 1973 she cofounded the Feminist Studio Workshop and Woman’s Building in Los Angeles.”

­­­­­­­­­Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

Leave a comment

Posted in Quotes, Reference

Tagged , , ,

Wellesley College

Posted on March 10, 2023 | Leave a comment

“Wellesley College: Private women’s college in Wellesley, Massachusetts, chartered in 1870. Long one of the the most eminent women’s colleges in the U.S., it was the first to provide scientific laboratories. It grants bachelor’s degrees in humanities, including Chines Japanese, and Russian languages; in social science, including African studies, religion, and economics; and in science and mathematics, including computer science. Among its facilities are an advanced science center and an observatory. Enrollment is about 2,3000.”

­­­­­­Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

Leave a comment

Posted in Quotes, Reference

Tagged , ,

Mabel Luhan Dodge

Posted on March 10, 2023 | Leave a comment

“Mabel Luhan Dodge: (1879-1962) American patroness of the arts and memoirist, Famous for her salons in Italy and New York in the early 20th century, Luhan cultivated close associations with D.H. Lawrence, John Reed, Gertrude Stein, and Carl Van Vechten. She had three husbands before she married a Pueblo Indian and settled in Taos, New Mexico, where she was a vital force behind the art colony there. She also wrote Lorenzo in Taos (1932) about her relationship with Lawrence, and a four-volume autobiography, Intimate Memories (1933-1937).”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference

Tagged , , ,

Book of Answers: A Famous Quip from Dorothy Parker

Posted on March 10, 2023 | Leave a comment

“Who wrote ‘Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses’? Dorothy Parker, known for her sharp wit, writer the famous couplet in the poem ‘News Item‘ in 1926.”

Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes

Tagged , ,

Bessie Head

Posted on March 3, 2023 | Leave a comment

“Bessie Head (originally Bessie Amelia Emery): (1937-1986) South African-Botswanan writer. Born in South Africa of an illegal union between a white mother and a black father, she suffered rejection and alienation from an early age. She described the contradictions and shortcomings of pre-and postcolonial African society in morally didactic novels and stories, including When Rain Clouds Gather (1969), Maru (1971), A Question of Power (1973), The Collector of Treasures (1977), Serowe, Village of the Rainwind (1981), A Bewitched Crossroad (1984) and The Cardinals.”

­­­­­­­­­Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference

Tagged , ,

Toni Morrison on Living

Posted on March 3, 2023 | Leave a comment

“I know what every colored woman in this country is doing…. Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.”

Toni Morrison

Sula (1973)

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes

Tagged , ,

Louise Bennett

Posted on March 3, 2023 | Leave a comment

“Louise Bennett: (1919-2006) Jamaican poet and folklorist. Louise Bennett is a distinctive and challenging female presence in Jamaican literature. Writing in Jamaican creole, she was one of the first to challenge the cultural hegemony of the Caribbean elite, and has been a model for the experimentation in language and rhythms of contemporary Caribbean poetry. Her celebration of African-Jamaican culture and promotion of black cultural self-confidence is apparent in her major collections (Jamaica) Dialect Verses (1942), Jamaica Labrish (1966) and Selected Poems (1983). Aunty Roachy Seh (1993) is a more recently published work.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference

Tagged , , , ,

Bernard Coard on the Middle-Class Bias

Posted on February 22, 2023 | Leave a comment

“The Middle Class Bias: In most cases, the teacher and the educational psychologist are middle class, in a middle class institution (which is what a school is), viewing the child through middle-class tinted glasses, the child being working class in most cases. Both on the basis of class and culture, they believe their standards to be the right and superior ones. They may do this in the most casual and unconscious ways, which may make the effect on the child even more devastating. The child may, therefore, not only because of problems with language but also because of feeling that he is somehow inferior, and bound to fail, refuse to communicate or to try his best in the tests for assessment….”

Excerpted from: Coard, Bernard. How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System: 50th Anniversary Expanded Fifth Edition. Kingston, Jamaica: McDermott Publishing, 2021.

Leave a comment

Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

Tagged , ,

W.E.B. Du Bois on Poverty

Posted on February 15, 2023 | Leave a comment

“To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk ch. 1 (1903)

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Leave a comment

Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

Tagged ,

Charlie Parker

Posted on February 15, 2023 | Leave a comment

Charlie Parker (originally Charles Christopher): (1920-1955) U.S. saxophonist and composer, one of the originators of bebop and among the greatest improvisers in jazz. Born in Kansas City, Parker played with Jay McShann’s big band (1940-42) and those or Earl Hines (1942-44) and Billy Eckstine (1944) before leading his own small groups in New York. (A nickname acquired in the early 1940s, Yardbird, was shortened to Bird and used throughout his career.) Parker frequently worked with Dizzy Gillespie in the mid-1940s, making a series of small-group recordings that heralded the arrival of bebop as a mature outgrowth of the improvisation of the late swing era. His direct, cutting tone and unprecedented dexterity on the alto saxophone made rapid tempos and fast flurries of notes trademarks of bebop, and his complex, subtle harmonic understanding brought and altogether new sound to the music. Easily the most influential jazz musician of his generation, his chronic drug addiction and early death contributed to making him a tragic legend.

Excerpted/Adapted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

Leave a comment

Posted in Quotes, Reference

Tagged , , ,