When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.
I was born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats.
Don’t go taking that gospel stuff seriously. It’s nice to clean you out now and then, but it ain’t for real. It’s like bad whiskey. Run through you fast and leave you with pain.
That was what gospel was meant to do – make you hate and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified.
Mama learned to laugh with them, before they could laugh at her, and to do it so well no one could be sure what she really thought or felt.
My heart broke all over again. I wanted my life back, my mama, but I knew I would never have that. The child I had been was gone with the child she had been. We were new people, and we didn’t know each other anymore. I shook my head desperately.
The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal.
People don’t do right because of the fear of God or love of him. You do right because the world doesn’t make sense if you don’t.
Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.
One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.
It ain’t that you get religion. Religion gets you and then milks you dry. Won’t let you drink a little whiskey. Won’t let you make no fat-assed girls grin and giggle. Won’t let you do a damn thing except work for what you’ll get in the hearafter. I live in the here and now.
I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself.
Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.
Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.
Piece by piece, my mother is being stolen from me.
Why write stories? To join the conversation.
Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.
I tell my students you have an absolute right to write about people you know and love. You do. But the kicker is you have a responsibility to make the characters large enough that you will not have sinned against them.
I think I would have died if there hadn’t been the women’s movement.
I would imagine being tied up and put in a haystack while someone put the dry, stale straw ablaze. I would picture it perfectly while rocking on my hand. The daydream was about struggling to get free while the fire burned hotter and closer. I am not sure if I came when the fire reached me or after I had imagined escaping it. But I came. I orgasmed on my hand to the dream of fire.