He didn’t want an outsider judging his family. That was his job.
Not even trying, he had become the kind of man who could walk into a house and make the women cry. Because with him, in his presence, they could. There was something blessed in his manner. Women saw him and wanted to weep – to tell him that their chest hurt and their knees did too. Strong women and wise saw him and told him things they only told each other:.
All narrative begins for me as listening. When I read, I listen. When I write, I listen – for silence, inflection, rhythm, rest.
Daily life took as much as she had. The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind. And if it didn’t stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out.
Good is knowing when to stop.
In a way she was jealous of death.
I’m a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I’m also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and an American, plus I’m an African-American, and a woman. I know it seems like I’m spreading like algae when I put it this way, but I’d like to think of the prize being distributed to these regions and nations and races.
You know, the kind who know Jesus by His first name, but out of politeness never use it even to His face.
What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.
Female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when – especially when – it is seen through the prism of economic freedom.
Good editors are really the third eye. Cool. Dispassionate. They don’t love you or your work.
You accepted like a beast of burden the whip of a stranger’s curse and the mindless menace it holds along with the scar it leaves as a definition you spend your life refuting although that hateful word is only a slim line drawn on a shore and quickly dissolved in a seaworld any moment when an equally mindless wave fondles it like the accidental touch of a finger on a clarinet stop that the musician converts into silence in order to let the true note ring out loud.
The loneliness she felt before Frank walked her home from Wang’s cleaners began to dissolve and in its place a shiver of freedom, of earned solitude, of choosing the walls she wanted to break through, minus the burden of shouldering a tilted man. Unobstructed and undistracted, she could get serious and develop a plan to match her ambition and succeed.
The danger of sympathizing with the stranger is the possibility of becoming a stranger. To lose one’s racial-ized rank is to lose one’s own valued and enshrined difference.
Reverend Father is the only kind man I ever see. When I arrive here I believe it is the place he warns against. The freezing in hell that comes before the everlasting fire where sinners bubble and singe forever. But the ice comes first, he says. And when I see knives of it hanging from the houses and trees and feel the white air burn my face I am certain the fire is coming.
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 relied on people being what they said they were, because there was no other way to survive.
For a nickel a month, Lady Jones did what whitepeople thought unnecessary if not illegal: crowded her little parlor with the colored children who had time for and interest in book learning.
I wonder if the person he wants to marry is me or a black girl? And if it isn’t me he wants, but any black girl who looks like me, talks and acts like me, what will happen when he finds out that I hate ear hoops, that I don’t have to straighten my hair, that Mingus puts me to sleep, that sometimes I want to get out of my skin and be only the person inside – not American – not black – just me?
Long ago she had given up trying to be deft or profound or anything in the company of people she was not interested in, who didn’t thrill her.
I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.