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.

She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.

I want to feel what I feel. What’s mine. Even if it’s not happiness, whatever that means. Because you’re all you’ve got.

Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t...

In Tar Baby, the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from...

She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you...

I didn’t plan on either children or writing. Once I realized that writing satisfied me in some enormous way, I had to make adjustments. The writing was always marginal in terms of time when the...

For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.

No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.

If you’re going to hold someone down you’re going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in...

Take off that coat,’ he told him.’Sir?”You heard me.’The boy slipped out of his jacket, whining, ‘What you gonna do? What I’m gonna wear?’The man untied the baby from her chest and wrapped it in...

Poison is like the drowned; it always floats.