Quote

That's the beauty and the terror of being human beings: We just have these symbolic languages, these dreams, and that's all it ever is.

John Edgar Wideman

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John Edgar Wideman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: June 14
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Language
Dream
Ever
Symbolic
Human
Languages
Humans
Terror
Beings
Dreams
Beauty

More quotes by John Edgar Wideman

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Things seem to fall apart inevitably.
John Edgar Wideman
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I believe - what did Faulkner say? The past is not even past.
John Edgar Wideman
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A great artist transforms our world, removes scales from our eyes, plugs from our ears, gloves from our fingertips and teaches us to perceive reality differently.
John Edgar Wideman
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When it's played the way is supposed to be played, basketball happens in the air flying, floating, elevated above the floor, levitating the way oppressed peoples of this earth imagine themselves in their dreams.
John Edgar Wideman
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I'm not a fearful person, but I'm a pretty pessimistic person. So some of my best times are waiting, anticipating. That's the way it always has been with me, whether anticipating a ball game, anticipating a relationship.
John Edgar Wideman
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That's one of the beauties, I think, of African American life. There was this thing called slavery and adjustments were made. It literally destroyed millions, but it didn't destroy everybody and it didn't destroy the inner lives of all the people who experienced it.
John Edgar Wideman
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I don't write books because I have answers. I write books because I have questions. What we are is the questions that we ask, not the answers that we provide. It's all about the process of self-examination. I think that's what the best writing always contains.
John Edgar Wideman
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My mother loved my father. From my view, she let him get away with too much. It broke my heart to see him in an old people's home and stop being strong and lose his voice.
John Edgar Wideman
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Everything is up for grabs, everything is relative. Except nothing is if you are serious about it because the moment you become serious about answering a question you have a stake in it. Relatively goes out of the window, in one sense because you're putting your a** out there - you are depending on the answer, you need the answer.
John Edgar Wideman
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There are still horrible things that go on because of the myth of race, but we don't have to succumb totally.
John Edgar Wideman
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I'm very hard-nosed and cold-blooded and I can walk past a drowning man. If I have someplace else to go, well, tough s**t. I could do that. I can. Have. Sometimes, not because I was callous but had to do it.
John Edgar Wideman
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When I'm writing, I'm thinking, Well, this might be a book that I'll always be happy with, and certainly readers will be happy with. But another part of me knows that when I'm past the stage of writing, the book is gonna have good things about it, bad things about it - probably more bad than good. I just know that. That's who I am.
John Edgar Wideman
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The hardship, the pain, the suffering of my brother and my son in prison, that's absolutely their experience, that's not mine. I don't get any credit for enduring that. I never give myself any credit for enduring that.
John Edgar Wideman
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I don't tell everything. I want the reader to have the feeling that maybe they know the whole truth, but they don't.
John Edgar Wideman
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Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.
John Edgar Wideman
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I really dislike when people talk about experimental, because any good writer is experimental. As a writer, you don't know what the hell you're doing. You're just doing it. You hope it works out well. I've been experimenting with these things myself in my own books.
John Edgar Wideman
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If Mumia Abu-Jamal has nothing important to say, why are so many powerful people trying to shut him up?
John Edgar Wideman
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My father combined many of the elements that were feared in the culture, but also he was a warm figure, a figure we needed. We depended on him to give us a little bit of strength and courage.
John Edgar Wideman
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I get off on anticipating and waiting much more than I get off on the actual event.
John Edgar Wideman
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You have to be a minor superhero just to get to be a dignified man, and that's kind of exacerbated for men of color.
John Edgar Wideman