Literary Birthday – 25 January – Gloria Naylor

Gloria Naylor was born 25 January 1950, and died 28 September 2016.

Gloria Naylor Quotes

1. But I don’t believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or to make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.
2. Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.
3. I care about language — I want my language to be beautiful — and about telling the truth as I see it with my characters’ lives.
4. One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.
5. You can’t teach talent. You can’t put in what God left out – but you can teach confidence.
6. Time’s passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystallize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand.
7. To tell his or her story is the desire of any artist.

Gloria Naylor was an American novelist. She was known for her sensitive, nuanced portrayals of African American women. Her most popular work, The Women of Brewster Place, was made into a film starring Oprah Winfrey. In 1998 Naylor returned to the setting of her first book with The Men of Brewster Place.

Source for image: By David Shankbone – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gloria_Naylor_by_David_Shankbone.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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