A Raisin in the Sun Quotes

Quote 1: "Weariness has, in fact, won in this room. Everything has been polished, washed, sat on, used, scrubbed too often. All pretenses but living itself have long since vanished from the very atmosphere of this room" Act 1, Scene 1, pg. 3

Quote 2: "Check coming today?" Act 1, Scene 1, pg. 6

Quote 3: "Now - whose little old angry man are you?" Act 1, Scene 1, pg. 11

Quote 4: "Yeah. You see, this little liquor store we got in mind cost seventy-five thousand and we figured the initial investment on the place be 'bout thirty thousand, see. That be ten thousand each... Baby, don't nothing happen for you in this world 'less you pay somebody off!" Act 1, Scene 1, pg. 14-15

Quote 5: "We one group of men tied to a race of women with small minds." Act 1, Scene 1, pg. 17

Quote 6: "a woman who has adjusted to many things in life and overcome many more, her face is full of strength. She has, we can see, wit and faith of a kind that keep her eyes lit and full of interest and expectancy. She is, in a word, a beautiful woman. Her bearing is perhaps most like the noble bearing of the women of the Hereros of Southwest Africa - rather as if she imagines that as she walks she still bears a basket or a vessel upon her head." Act 1, Scene 1, pg. 22

Quote 7: "Mama, something is happening between Walter and me. I don't know what it is - but he needs something - something I can't give him any more. He needs this chance, Lena." Act 1, Scene 1, pg. 25

Quote 8: "Big Walter used to say, he'd get right wet in the eyes sometimes, lean his head back with the water standing in his eyes and say, 'Seem like God didn't see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams - but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worth while.'" Act 1, Scene 1, pg. 29

Quote 9: "The Murchisons are honest-to-God-real-live-rich-colored people, and the only people in the world who are more snobbish than rich white people are rich colored people. I thought everybody knew that." Act 1, Scene 1, pg. 34

Quote 10: "In my mother's house there is still God." Act 1, Scene 1, pg. 37

Quote 11: "Now I ain't saying what I think. But I ain't never been wrong 'bout a woman neither." Act 1, Scene 2, pg. 41

Quote 12: "Assimilationism is so popular in your country." Act 1, Scene 2, pg. 48

Quote 13: "When a man goes outside his home to look for peace." Act 1, Scene 2, pg. 60

Quote 14: "Something has changed. You something new, boy. In my time we was worried about not being lynched and getting to the North if we could and how to stay alive and still have a pinch of dignity too...Now here come you and Beneatha - talking 'bout things we ain't never even thought about hardly, me and your daddy. You ain't satisfied or proud of nothing we done. I mean that you had a home; that we kept you out of trouble till you was grown; that you don't have to ride to work on the back of nobody's streetcar - You my children - but how different we done become." Act 1, Scene 2, pg. 62

Quote 15: "Oh, it's just a college girl's way of calling people Uncle Toms - but that isn't what it means at all." Act 2, Scene 1, pg. 72

Quote 16: "I see you all the time - with the books tucked under your arms - going to your (British A - a mimic) 'clahsses.' And for what! What the hell you learning over there? Filling up your heads - (Counting off on his fingers) - with the sociology and the psychology - but they teaching you how to be a man? How to take over and run the world? They teaching you how to run a rubber plantation or a steel mill? Naw - just to talk proper and read books and wear white shoes..." Act 2, Scene 1, pg. 76

Quote 17: "What you need me to say you done right for? You the head of this family. You run our lives like you want to. It was your money and you did what you wanted with it. So what you need for me to say it was all right for? So you butchered up a dream of mine - you - who always talking 'bout your children's dreams..." Act 2, Scene 1, pg. 87

Quote 18: "And from now on any penny that come out of it or that go in it is for you to look after. For you to decide. It ain't much, but it's all I got in the world and I'm putting in your hands. I'm telling you to be head of this family from now on like you supposed to be." Act 2, Scene 2, pg. 94

Quote 19: "Girl, I do believe you are the first person in the history of the entire human race to successfully brainwash yourself." Act 2, Scene 3, pg. 98

Quote 20: "Well - I don't understand why you people are reacting this way. What do you think you are going to gain by moving into a neighborhood where you just aren't wanted and where some elements - well - people can get awful worked up when they feel that their whole way of life and everything they've ever worked for is threatened...You just can't force people to change their hearts, son." Act 2, Scene 3, pg. 105-6

Quote 21: "He talked Brotherhood. He said everybody ought to learn how to sit down and hate each other with good Christian fellowship." Act 2, Scene 3, pg. 107

Quote 22: "I seen...him...night after night...come in...and look at that rug...and then look at me...the red showing in his eyes...the veins moving in his head...I seen him grow thin and old before he was forty...working and working and working like somebody's old horse...killing himself...and you - you give it all away in a day..." Act 2, Scene 3, pg. 117

Quote 23: "I live the answer! (pause) In my village at home it is the exceptional man who can even read a newspaper...or who ever sees a book at all. I will go home and much of what I will have to say will seem strange to the people of my village...But I will teach and work and things will happen, slowly and swiftly. At times it will seem that nothing changes at all...and then again...the sudden dramatic events which make history leap into the future. And then quiet again. Retrogression even. Guns, murder, revolution. And I even will have moments when I wonder if the quiet was not better than all that death and hatred. But I will look about my village at the illiteracy and disease and ignorance and I will not wonder long. And perhaps...perhaps I will be a great man...I mean perhaps I will hold on to the substance of truth and find my way always with the right course..." Act 3, pg. 124

Quote 24: "Sometimes you just got to know when to give up some things...and hold on to what you got." Act 3, pg. 130

Quote 25: "There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing." Act 3, pg. 135

Quote 26: "He finally come into his manhood today, didn't he? Kind of like a rainbow after the rain..." Act 3, pg. 141