Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer’s language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures – its cruelty is its vitality.

Hunger steals the memory

She gave her husband such a night of sexual pleasure that his eyes followed her constantly after that, narrow and hot. He grew molten when she passed near other men, and at night they made...

I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.

I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she’s never been told about.

[She also tempers emotion with wry perspective. A woman driven to infamy by passion cannot have the man she loves.] As women have found since love began, … she found she could live.

The pattern glitters with cruelty. The blue beads are colored with fish blood, the reds with powdered heart. The beads collect in borders of mercy. The yellows are dyed with the ocher of silence. There...

I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for.

Delphine witnessed awful things occurring to other humans. Worse than that, she was powerless to alter their fate. It would be that way all her life–disasters, falling like chairs all around her, falling so close...

Love won’t be tampered with, love won’t go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It’s invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.

Delphine began to read with a mad attention when she wanted to talk to Clarisse. She saw that in her life there was a woman-shaped hole, a cutout that led to a mysterious place. Through...

Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.

Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn’t discover America.

Women without children are also the best of mothers,often, with the patience,interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot always sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious...

There will never come a time when I will be able to resist my emotions.

For it was through books that she felt her life to be unjudged Look at all of the great mix-ups, messes, confinement, and double-dealings in Shakespeare, she thought.Identities disguised continually, in a combative dance of...

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with.

Wherever the family was, these two dogs, both six-year-old shepherd mixes, took up their posts at the central coming-and-going point. Gil called them concierge dogs. And it’s true, they were inquisitive and accommodating. But they...

Emotions unreel in her like spools of cotton.

And it occurred to me how even pulling trees that day, just months ago, I was in heaven. Unaware. I had known nothing even as the evil was occurring, I hadn’t been touched yet.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the...

They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness

Women don’t realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.

Ravens are the birds I’ll miss most when I die. If only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence. If only we did not have...

Upon walking into Eva’s kitchen, something profound happened to Delphine. She experienced a fabulous expansion of being. Light-headed, she felt a swooping sensation and then a quiet, as though she’d settled like a bird.

To love another another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection , it is a magnificent task…tremendous and foolish and human.

In our own beginnings, we are formed out of the body’s interior landscape, For a short while, our mothers’ bodies are the boundaries and personal geography which are all that we know of the world.

He had a thousand-year-old stare.

I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?

When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.

One of Tobasonakwut’s favorite phrases is andopawatchigan, which means “seek your dream,” but is lots more complicated. It means that first you have to find and identify your dream, often through fasting, and then that...

You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It’s invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.

A woman’s body is the gate to this life. A man’s body is the gate to the next life.

Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time...

As Delphine watched, into her head there popped a strange notion: the idea that perhaps strongly experienced moments, as when Eva turned and the sun met her hair and for that one instant the symbol...

Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands.

You’re talking about evolving a cuisine from a people whose cuisine has been whatever we could get for a long time.

They’re all the same– the cop, the criminal, the defense, the prosecutor– they all share a fundamental belief in the malleability of truth

I tried to get away from him, to get to that door, but instead I backed up against the wall and was stuck there in that white, white room.

Her mind was present because she was always gone. Her hands were filled because they grasped the meaning of empty. Life was simple. Her husband returned and she served him with indifferent patience this time....

The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.

It was enough just to sit there without words.

If, as I suspect, my body survives by uttering itself over and over again, then I have some questions. If [I] am one word, so are my daughters, so are all of us in strings...

Why now that he’s sober and thoughtful, and living as a good man, does he get in the worst trouble of his life?

I hold his name close as my own blood and I will never let it out. I only spoke it that once so he would know he was alive.

The music was more than music- at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that...

I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.