Best quotes by John Edgar Wideman on History

Checkout quotes by John Edgar Wideman on History

• ‟ I don't understand why black people have been so quiescent, so passive over the hundreds of years of American history. Why hasn't there been more violence, more armed struggle? I know answers to some of that, but it seems to me it's an issue of faith, an abiding faith in some sort of great beyond, or great spirit, or even in the American dream.

  - John Edgar Wideman
  

• ‟ My particular lifetime, my individual profile, represents something very basic to African-American history and culture because I was a second generation immigrant, so to speak, from the South. My grandfather was born in South Carolina - well, both grandfathers were born in the South.

  - John Edgar Wideman
  

• ‟ The title of my book is 'American Histories,' plural. And as far as I'm concerned, my reading of history is it is a sort of nightmare. It is a sort of nightmare, and I'm trying to wake up from it. And as any nightmare, it's full of much that is unspeakable.

  - John Edgar Wideman
  

• ‟ In Haiti, as I understand it, storytelling and history itself are not a business of necessarily elucidating facts or the truth of an incident, but finding the version that is most entertaining and therefore will get retold and live in immortality.

  - John Edgar Wideman
  

• ‟ For African-American people, I am in the business of inventing a reality that gives a different perspective - on history, on crime, on art, on love.

  - John Edgar Wideman