Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.

What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from...

You have pissed your last in this house . . . and I don’t make velvet roses anymore.

Sleep without the fragrance of her hair next to him was impossible.

It’s a bad word, ‘belong.’ Especially when you put it with somebody you love … You can’t own a human being.

It’s gonna hurt, now,” said Amy. “anything dead coming back to life hurts.

We were two throats and one eye and we had no price.

I don’t think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It’s perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.

From the windows, through the fur of snow, the landscape became more melancholy when the sun successfully brightened the quiet trees, unable to speak without their leaves.

In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection. It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when...

Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.

In a way, her strangeness, her naivete, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or...

Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.

And when spring comes to the City people notice one another in the road; notice the strangers with whom they share aisles and tables and the space where intimate garments are laundered. going in and...

Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something...

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence;...

I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else....

Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all day by themselves with no help from the mind.

Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him … His subconscious knew what his min did not guess-that hating them would have consumed him, burned...

God puzzled her and she was too ashamed of Him to say so.

She knew Paul D was adding something to her life—something she wanted to count on but was scared to… His waiting eyes and awful human power. The mind of him that knew her own. Her...

I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.

…maybe you think up North is way different from down South. Don’t believe it and don’t count on it. Custom is just as real as law and can be just as dangerous.

We will be judged by how well we love.

I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped...

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.

He wondered if there was anyone in the world who liked him. Liked him for himself alone.

What excited and challenged her shipmates horrified the churched women and each set believed the other deeply, dangerously flawed. Although they had nothing in common with the views of each other, they had everything in...

You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that?...

How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn’t love it. The minute...

To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.

Not like the me was some tough somebody, or somebody she had put together for show. But like, like somebody she favored and could count on. A secret somebody you didn’t have to feel sorry...

That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it...

Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.

In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.

Every Saturday morning, first thing before breakfast, his parents held conferences with their children requiring them to answer two questions put to each of them: 1. What have you learned that is true (and how...

It comforts everybody to think of all Negroes as dirt poor, and to regard those who were not, who earned good money and kept it, as some kind of shameful miracle. White people liked that...

There’s a difference between writing for a living and writing forlife. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises….If you write for life, you’ll work hard; you’ll do what’s honest,not what pays

I don’t believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to this particular plight or insensitive to that, but they were political, because that’s what an artist is―a politician.

But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.

And in all those escapes he could not help being astonished by the beauty of this land that was not his. He his in its breast, fingered its earth for food, clung to its banks...

He licked his lips. ‘Well, if you want my opinion-‘‘I don’t, ‘ She said. ‘I have my own.

if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away

Birth, life, and death― each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.

Paul D did not answer because she didn’t expect or want him to, but he did know what she meant. Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission...

Hate does that. Burns off everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemy’s.

The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language...

No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along.

Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.