Push Quotes
"The miracle of Sapphire’s gift is that she weaves her sharp social commentary and critique into the fabric of this story without shredding its fibers."
"This is a novel about people and their problems, not problems and their people."
"Yet while her life is certainly shaped by these forces, they do not compromise her vibrant humanity."
"Some critics were appalled by the very idea of this story, with this heroine, being held up as an important work of literature."
"Imagine our shock and delight in 1996 when the entire literary world was on fire with the publication of Push."
"Precious's people are those who know firsthand the trouble Sapphire has seen."
"A novel is a work of art, and Push is no exception."
"The experience of reading this novel is best captured in the scene when Precious gives birth on the kitchen floor, the scene from which the novel takes its name."
"The longest journey begins with a single step."
"You're going to write in your journal every day."
"Write what's on your mind, push yourself to see the letters that represent the words you're thinking."
"No matter how fly my braids are, how I grease my skin, scalp, no matter how many jewels, this is my mother."
"It's a big country. Say bombs cost more than welfare. Bombs to murder kids and stuff—all that cost more than milk and Pampers. Say no shame. No shame."
"You could go further than your mother. You could get your G.E.D. and go to college. You could do anything, Precious, but you gotta believe it."
"Being a good mother might mean letting your baby be raised by someone who is better able than you to meet the child's needs."
"I gotta learn more than ABCs now. I got to learn more than read write, this big BIG. This the biggest thing happen to Precious P. Jones in her life."
"Writing could be the boat carry you to the other side."
"Each day is different. All the days is gobbed together to make a year, all the years gobbed together to make a life."
"I’m alive inside. A bird is my heart. Mama and Daddy is not win. I’m winning."
"Ms Rain say don’t always rhyme, stretch for words to fall like drops of rain, snowflakes—did you know no two snowflakes is alike?"
"It’s a black girl across the table from me with long pretty hair in dreadlocks like Ms Rain. But not wild like Ms Rain."
"I’m not happy to be HIV positive. I don’t understand why some kids git a good school and mother and father and some don’t. But Rita say forgit the WHY ME shit and git on to what’s next."
"Inner city signifies an imperiled existence, but home is a signifier of safety."
"The novel I wrote challenges the idea that for so-called marginalized communities the only hope is white intervention and/or escape."
"Too often, controversial texts are not taught regularly in the classroom because teachers themselves are not confident enough to engage their students in discussion of the recognizably challenging and sensitive subject matter."
"I wanted what happens when you read—the words coming into your mind through the eye, the ear, the fingertips."
"One reader told me that after reading PUSH, she saw the longing and beauty of Precious everywhere in faces that were formerly invisible to her."
"Silence will not save African-Americans. We’ve got to work hard and long, and our work begins by telling our stories out loud to whoever has the courage to listen."
"I write about black women because it’s the world I know."
"What right does an accused group or individual have to cut out the tongue of the one who accuses because the accusation is making the accused look bad or disrupts their own victim narrative?"
"The pathology the op-ed writer fears being associated with is incest, well described in Black literature from The Invisible Man to The Bluest Eye."
"COVID-19, like all diseases, hits hardest the poor, the people of color, and the socially vulnerable."
"The African American experience is the fourth dimension to an immigrant who believes there is no caste system in America and that he got to where he is because he 'worked very hard.'"