Beneatha: You didn’t tell us what Alaiyo means… for all I know, you might be calling me Little Idiot or something… … Asagai: It means… it means One for Whom Bread–Food–Is Not Enough.
Big Walter used to say, he’d get right wet in the eyes sometimes, lean his head back with the water standing in his eyes and say, ‘Seem like God didn’t see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams – but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worth while.’
A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness, as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men – and people in general.
Do I remain a revolutionary? Intellectually — without a doubt. But am I prepared to give my body to the struggle or even my comforts? This is what I puzzle about.
I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from truthful identity of what is.
Though it be a thrilling and marvellous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so – doubly dynamic – to be young, gifted and black.
It is difficult for the American mind to adjust to the realization that the Rhetts and the Scarletts were as much monsters as the keepers of Buchenwald-they just dressed more attractively.
