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

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...

…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.

I think that’s what Toni Morrison and Alice Walker understand, the secret language of women. That it’s not a secret at all; men just don’t know how to listen.

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

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

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.

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...