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.

Lonely was much better than alone.

People say to write about what you know. I’m here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don’t know anything. So write about something you don’t know. And don’t be scared,...

I am really Chloe Anthony Wofford. That’s who I am. I have been writing under this other person’s name. I write some things now as Chloe Wofford, private things. I regret having called myself Toni...

I am charmed by the idea that there is an activity known as work and another as play, although even in grade school the distinction eluded me. I remember how full of hope I was...

Después hizo algo mágico: levantó las piernas y los pies de Sethe y los masajeó hasta que lloró lágrimas saladas. -Ahora te dolerá -dijo Amy-. Siempre que lo muerto vuelve a la vida, duele.

If she answered, he could not hear it, and he certainly couldn’t see her, so he went. First he crawled the rocks one by one, one by one, till his hands touched shore and the...

Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another–physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.

I’m interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.

God take what He would,” she said. And He did, and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle who gave her freedom when it didn’t mean a thing.

She missed — without knowing what she missed– paints and crayons

They hooted and laughed all the way back to the car, teasing Milkman, egging him on to tell more about how scared he was. And he told them. Laughing too, hard, loud, and long. Really...

If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

That all started in the period of state art, when you had the communists and fascists running around doing this poster stuff, and the reaction was ‘No, no, no; there’s only aesthetics.’ My point is...

The best thing she was, was her children.

Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the consolation of a clan. Baptists, Presbyterians, tribe, army, family, some encircling outside thing was needed. Pride, she thought....

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies.

When I write, I don’t translate for white readers…. Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we’re able to read him. If I’m specific, and I don’t overexplain, then anyone can overhear me.

At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don’t need...

She looked around for a place to be. A small place. The closet? … It was both small and bright, and she wanted to be in a very small, very bright place. Small enough to...