"I think it's too easy to recount your unhappy memories when you write about yourself. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles."
Margo JeffersonTiny Panda Quotes
Quotes by Margo Jefferson
Margo Jefferson, an acclaimed American author, critic, and essayist, has profoundly shaped contemporary literature and cultural discourse. Born on April 28, 1947, in Chicago, Illinois, she emerged as a powerful voice in exploring race, gender, and identity through her incisive writing. A former staff writer for The New York Times, Jefferson's notable works include her memoir, "Negroland," which reflects on her experiences growing up in a privileged Black family. Her legacy continues to inspire conversations about the complexities of American identity and the nuances of societal norms.
5 quotes found
"If you were a successful upper-middle-class Negro girl in the 1950s and '60s, you were, in practice and imagination, a white Protestant upper middle-class girl. Young, good-looking white women were the most desirable creatures in the world. It was hard not to want to imitate them; it was highly toxic, too, as we would learn."
Margo Jefferson"Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically solitary Ella Fitzgerald approached much as the basically solitary Marianne Moore approached poetry: reading it with a certain contempt for it, Moore said, you could find a place in it for the genuine."
Margo Jefferson
"As the years pass, I find that writers who were once central to me aren't anymore. I revered Yeats's poetry in college. I respect it now and am still ravished by certain lines, but I don't go back to him again and again. I do go back to Emily Dickinson again and again."
Margo Jefferson