3 Quotes & Sayings By Lillian E Smith

Lillian E. Smith was an outspoken proponent of women's rights and civil rights issues and was a friend and mentor to many famous and influential people, including Margaret Mead, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, and Walter Cronkite. She was also a lifelong advocate of the arts and a champion of literacy. She is best known for her novel "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 Read more

Her autobiography, "How I Grew," was released in 1992. A second volume of her autobiography, entitled "Letters from a War," was released in 2003.

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I keep thinking about the fragmented quality of human awareness: You take your blindness for granted most of the time then suddenly it stuns you: how little you see as you plunge ahead from minute to minute, day to day, year to year - vision cut down to the arc of a flickering flashlight, never sure how your words and acts are affecting someone else because you never really see that someone as he is. I know we should find even the most serene life unendurable were we to possess to any real degree those extrasensory perceptions which our grandmothers believed in.. Lillian E. Smith
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I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within. Lillian E. Smith