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Book: Negroland
Quotes of Book: Negroland
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  1. Margo Jefferson _ Negroland

    What I would have to do later, starting in college and in the years following, to become a person of inner consequence: break that fawning inner self into pieces.
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  2. Margo Jefferson _ Negroland

    And out in the wide wide world, the famous women we gazed upon never stopped reminding us that we must cherish that generic female future.
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  3. Margo Jefferson _ Negroland

    Elbow grease" is not a metaphor.
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  4. Margo Jefferson _ Negroland

    I hate when I'm supposed to be having fun and Race singles me out for special chores and duties.
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  5. Margo Jefferson _ Negroland

    White people wanted to be white just as much as we did. They worked just as hard at it. They failed more often. But they could pass, so no one objected.
    book-quotewhiteness

  6. Margo Jefferson _ Negroland

    You are a single woman; you intend to remain one. You've acquired enough sexual experience to feel you belong to your times. You do not have children; you never intended to. Sustained romantic intensities have not been for you. Your explanation {not an untrue one,though not quite sufficient} is that you have let yourself be shaped by so many conventions, expectations, and requirements {institution's, people's}, by so much dread of disapproval, that the discipline of solitude-severe solitude-has been required to give you the sense of an independent selfhood. The intensities of friendship suit you better. Friendship's choreography is for multiple partners: for varied groups and surprisingly sustained duets.
    book-quoteidentityindependence

  7. Margo Jefferson _ Negroland

    - I've never been so sick of RACE in my life.Every group with its rights and grievances, its mathematically precise litany of what has been denied, what should have been granted long ago, what must be restored and redressed. Even everyday WASPS compete now. Because their sense of being dispossessed, displaced, bullied, has in an amazingly short time become as acute, as outraged, as righteous as that of the groups they managed and mangled for so long.- This is my dream. Eradicate them all. Then fix your hair, and put your hands in your muff as your heels go clip clip clip across the pavement.- May I help you, ma'am?- Thank your, sir, I've just murdered quite a few people and I need a taxi.
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  8. Margo Jefferson _ Negroland

    The human psyche is pathetic," I say–I declaim–to my psychopharmacologist. "It's what we have, Miss Jefferson," he replies, "it's what we have." And what I have is what I take to my psychotherapist each week. What I have is what we make together, each supplying the material she knows best. There are days when I still want to dismantle this constructed self of mine. You did it so badly, I think. You lost so much time. And then I tell myself, so what? So what? Go on.
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