“ 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… Margo Jefferson
“ 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 th… Margo Jefferson
“ I was taught you don't tell your secrets to strangers - certainly not secrets that expose error, weakness, failure. My generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements receive… Margo Jefferson
“ White people wanted to be white just as much as we did. They worked just as hard at it. They failed more often. But they could pass, so no one objected. Margo Jefferson
“ New York, for decades, offered a perpetual series of 'golden ages' to artists. You constantly had to measure yourself against the best, and you had to watch them, which meant that your imagination and… Margo Jefferson
“ I hate when I'm supposed to be having fun and Race singles me out for special chores and duties. 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 con… Margo Jefferson
“ I’ve never been so sick of RACE in my life.Every group with its rights and grievances, its mathematically precise litany of what has been denied, what should have been granted long ago, what must be r… Margo Jefferson
“ You are a single woman; you intend to remain one. You’ve acquired enough sexual experience to feel you belong to your times. You do not have children; you never intended to. Sustained romantic intensi… Margo Jefferson
“ And out in the wide wide world, the famous women we gazed upon never stopped reminding us that we must cherish that generic female future. Margo Jefferson
“ Negro privilege had to be circumspect: impeccable but not arrogant; confident yet obliging; dignified, not intrusive. Margo Jefferson
“ 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 Jefferson
“ Striving ardently to be what they were and were not. Behold the Race Flaneur: the bourgeois rebel who goes slumming, and finds not just adventure but the objective correlative for his secret despair. Margo Jefferson
“ What I would have to do later, starting in college and in the years following, to become a person of inner consequence: break that fawning inner self into pieces. Margo Jefferson
“ We sing more colored than the Africans, boasted John Lennon, and few Americans were inclined to dispute him. Margo Jefferson
