Randi Pink > Quotes

“Black skin was filled with so many barriers, so many restrictions, so many.”
― Randi Pink, Into White

“The shocking death of a loved one isn't a wailing thing. The real shudder comes from the world moving on as if nothing's happened. Shops flip their Closed signs to Open, patrons gather at the theaters and soda shops, and people dare smile at things that make them happy, while those left in the ruins find joy in nothing.”
― Randi Pink, Angel of Greenwood

“While I was asking God to change me, he was utilising what he was born with to conquer all things”
― Randi Pink, Into White

“The only space for Black Tulsans in the white imagination had become too successful. Too much of a threat,”
― Randi Pink, Angel of Greenwood

“No, worse, the one that fights members of its own army: dark-skinned against light-skinned, uppity against inner city, good hair against bad hair;”
― Randi Pink, Into White

“No revolutionary cared so much how they were seen within the flawed world. They only cared for repairing it.”
― Randi Pink, Angel of Greenwood

“June 1, 1921, idyllic, prosperous, exceptional Greenwood was looted and burned by white rioters. In a span of fewer than twenty-four hours, thirty-five city blocks were charred, over eight hundred people were treated for injuries, and historians have estimated that somewhere between one hundred and three hundred lives were lost.”
― Randi Pink, Angel of Greenwood

“Real pain existed there. Not only the pain of pregnancy, but the pain of denying it. That type of denial took work.”
― Randi Pink, Girls Like Us

“Working for one's own benefit is not work at all.”
― Randi Pink, Angel of Greenwood

“Sometimes you gotta let things be. Set it all loose or else you lose yourself.” Missippi reached for Izella’s hand. “You got folks loving you that you don’t even know are there.”
― Randi Pink, Girls Like Us

“but when I Googled Latoya, I didn’t find any victoriousness, only black women looking like Damn, why did they have to name me Latoya?”
― Randi Pink, Into White

“I was an essential piece. We were family, and in that rare moment, none of us cared what anyone outside the car thought.”
― Randi Pink, Into White

“Izella shook her thoughts away again, trying to reorganize herself into the sister with the right answer. Best thing for everybody was no baby. No baby for Evangelist to know about, no baby to send Walter into the shakes, no baby to split Ola from a girl into a mama.”
― Randi Pink, Girls Like Us

“Greenwood chipped in to help prop up Isaiah's household. He, therefore, was quietly indepted to them all, even his best friend. Isaiah could never show himself as he truly was on the inside. He could only acquiesce and get through the day.”
― Randi Pink, Angel of Greenwood

“If I fall off a cliff, believe me, I'll get back up. If I'm pushed off a cliff, still believe I'll get back up. But I'll never forgive the muthafucka that pushed me.”
― Randi Pink, We Are the Scribes

“Anything but black, Lord, anything but black, never once considering what I was sacrificing in praying that prayer.”
― Randi Pink, Into White

“I consulted what I considered to be the handbooks of white females everywhere: Cosmo, Seventeen, and Teen Vogue.”
― Randi Pink, Into White

“He was a loyal friend with a bad attitude like Kanye West.”
― Randi Pink, Into White

“He revered Madam Harriet, as he’d called her. Honored her strength, resiliency, defiance. She seemed holy to him and I loved him more for it. But, simultaneously, he judged my mother, one of the most admired living Black women in the country, for her defiance and strength of will. She was a Black woman United States senator from Alabama, for goodness’ sake. An undeniable badass. Was that level of reverence only reserved for dead Black women? Or was the inconvenience of being Mr. Mom too blinding for him to see clearly?”
― Randi Pink, We Are the Scribes

“Isaiah was not one man, but two—himself and his black shadow—following him, sometimes pestering him, to utilize his own ingenuity in order to navigate the world made complicated by the color of his skin.”
― Randi Pink, Angel of Greenwood

“A fly on the wall would’ve thought it strange--a daughter telling her mother she’s pregnant and the mother quietly taking it in. But this is how they were. It had always been the two of them quietly against the whole world. While her horrible father fought for his own political photo ops, they were there like this together. Always.”
― Randi Pink, Girls Like Us