Make up a story… For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us...

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

Grownups don’t pay it much attention because they can’t imagine anything more majestic to a child than their own selves and so confused dependance for reverence.

What do you know about somebody not being good enough for somebody else? And since when did you care whether Corinthians stood up or fell down? You’ve been laughing at us all your life. Corinthians....

Nothing could be taken for granted. Women who loved you tried to cut your throat, while women who didn’t even know your name scrubbed your back. Witches could sound like Katharine Hepburn and your best...

I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can’t teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.

I sold my elegant blackness to all those childhood ghosts and now they pay me for it.

He can’t value you more than you value yourself.

Algún día irás andando por el camino y oirás o verás algo. Con toda claridad. Y pensarás que eres tú la que está pensando. Una imagen pensada. Pero no. Es cuando tropiezas con un recuerdo...

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other...

Apparently he thought he deserved only to be loved–from a distance, though–and given what he wanted. And in return he would be . . . what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was:...

All of us – all who knew her – felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified...

It had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping laugh. She had forgotten how deep and down it could be. So different from the miscellaneous giggles and smiles she had learned to...

Anger … it’s a paralyzing emotion … you can’t get anything done. People sort of think it’s an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don’t think it’s any of that — it’s helpless …...

Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don’t mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy...

I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, for the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.

I’ll tend to her as no mother ever tended a child, a daughter. Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my own children. I never had to give it to nobody else–and the...

You looked at me then like you knew me, and I thought it really was Eden, and I couldn’t take your eyes in because I was loving the hoof marks on your cheeks.

What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?

She was a tall woman with unfashionable hips and a long chestnut braid singing down her back.

Sethe, he says, “me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. “You your best thing,...

I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither…. So it seems...

See? See what you can do? Never mind you can’t tell one letter from another, never mind you born a slave, never mind you lose your name, never mind your daddy dead, never mind nothing....

Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love a free man is never safe.

But maybe a man was nothing but a man, which is what Baby Suggs always said. They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light...

Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.

I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don’t know why...

Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.

You are my shaper and my world as well. It is done. No need to choose.

When fear rules, obedience is the only survival choice.

She was fierce in the presence of death, heroic even, as she was at no other time. Its threat gave her direction, clarity, audacity.

There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

She led him to the top of the stairs, where light came straight from the sky because the second-story windows of that house had been placed in the pitched ceiling and not the walls. There...

The human body is robust. It can gather strength when it’s in mortal danger.

It sounded old. Deserve. Old and tired and beaten to death. Deserve. Now it seemed to him that he was always saying or thinking that he didn’t deserve some bad luck, or some bad treatment...

You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

I can’t tell you why I was in love with her. People didn’t require that much as they do now. Folks were expected to be civilized to one another, honest, and – and clear. You...

I laughed but before I could agree with the hairdressers that she was crazy, she said, ‘What’s the world for if you can’t make it up the way you want it?'” ‘The way I want...

In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietitude of every day life...

Writing is really a way of thinking–not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear.

Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult....

You think because he doesn’t love you that you are worthless. You think that because he doesn’t want you anymore that he is right — that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If...

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.[Conversation with Elizabeth Farnsworth, PBS NewsHour, March 9, 1998]

Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty….A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. His outrage grew and...

Her passions were narrow but deep.