being forced Quotes

“Poppa fought like a lion when they came for him, the strongest lion, roaring; it took five of them with hickory clubs, and then Momma fainted, and I caught baby Ruth.”

“That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.”

“Being loyal to the one who owned me gave me prickly thoughts, like burrs trapped in my shift, pressing into my skin with every step.”

“I worked as a puppet trained to scrub and carry, curtsy and nod.”

“He tried his utmost to corrupt the pure principles my grandmother had instilled . . . But he was my master. I was compelled to live under the same roof with him.”

“We always have choices, Tally. You’ve made yours.”

“The simple truth is the camp was no more ready for us when we got there than we were ready for it. We had only the dimmest ideas of what to expect.”

“They cannot deprive us of our homes and our fishing boats and our automobiles and lock us up for three years and then just turn us loose into the cities again. They have to help us get a new start.”

“The name Manzanar meant nothing to us when we left Boyle Heights. We didn’t know where it was or what it was. We went because the government ordered us to.”

He felt at once betrayed and betrayer, deceived and deceiver. He was a criminal forced into crime.

“You might say it would have happened sooner or later anyway, this sliding apart of such a large family, in postwar California. But there is no escaping the fact that our internment accelerated the process, made it happen so suddenly it was almost tangible. Not only did we stop eating at home, there was no longer a home to eat in.”

“I didn’t need ROTC. But I did it, and I did it good, because my dad was pretty much making me. He’s one of those dudes who feels like there’s no better opportunity for a black boy in this country than to join the army.”

“You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug—especially when it’s waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in your eyes.”

“But even if I had known I was getting such a bad husband, I had no choice, now or later. That was how backward families in the country were. We were always the last to give up stupid old-fashioned customs. In other cities already, a man could choose his own wife, with his parents’ permission of course. But we were cut off from this type of new thought. You never heard if ideas were better in another city, only if they were worse.”

″‘You are not to go outside under any circumstances,’ Silvia continued, ‘During the day, there will be times when you can go into the garden, but not without permission.‘”

“Our caste was just three away from the bottom. We were artists. And artists and classical musicians were only three steps up from dirt. Literally.”

“Can’t they work?” he asked me. “Look at all the pecan trees.” [. . .] “Get them off their lazy butts, they can make enough for a dozen toothbrushes in one evening.”
“That money usually goes to helping the family, Dr. Joseph.”

“Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people–they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.”

“There was a distinct method to the madness, every move propagated to force my hand, to lure me out of hiding with the sweet promise of finality.”

“The rulers of your minds indulge in proverbs, but they’ve forgotten the main one, that love cannot be forced, and they have a deeply rooted habit of liberating people and making them happy, especially those who haven’t asked for it.”

“But when a guy comes along and says here come with me and risk your life and maybe die or be crippled why then you’ve got no rights. You haven’t even the right to say yes or no or I’ll think it over.”

“He too had been taken away from his home. He too had been put into the service of another without his consent. He too had been sent to a foreign country far from his native parts. He too had been forced to fight against other slaves of his own kind in a strange place.”

“They were forcing him to be silent. They didn’t want to hear him. They weren’t interested in anything but getting him off their minds.”