Now I know why Baby Suggs pondered color her last years. She never had time to see, let alone enjoy it before.
Somewhere inside you is that free person I’m talking about. Locate her and let her do some good in the world.
Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn’t get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present – intolerable – and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color.
Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. And unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of “I” and choose the open spaces of “we”.
You can’t protect her every minute.
When good people take you in and treat you good, you ought to try to be good back.
That’s something you will have- a broken heart.
Art is not mere entertainment or decoration, it has meaning, and we both want and need to fathom that meaning – not fear, dismiss, or construct superficial responses told to us by authorities.
Their children were like distant but exposed wounds whose aches were no less intimate because separate from their flesh. They had looked at the world and back at their children, back at the world and back again at their children, and Sula knew that one clear young eye was all that kept the knife away from the throat’s curve.
124 was spiteful.
We must do all we can to imagine the Other before we presume to solve the problems work and life demand of us.
Make no mistake, the privatization of prisons is less about unburdening taxpayers than it is about providing bankrupt communities with sources of income and especially about providing corporations with a captured population available for unpaid labor.
And then she knew. Her friends and neighbors were angry at her because she had overstepped, given too much, offended them by excess.
Nobody counted on Garner dying. Nobody thought he could. How ’bout that? Everything rested on Garner being alive. Without his life each of theirs fell to pieces. Now ain’t that slavery or what is it?
Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.
As soon as one strip of husk was down, the rest obeyed and the ear yielded up to him its shy rows, exposed at last. How loose the silk. How quick the jailed-up flavor ran free. No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you. How loose the silk. How fine and loose and free.
It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too.
Nobody loves the head of a dandelion. Maybe because they are so many, strong, and soon.
He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be.
Writing of, about, and within a world committed to racial dominances without employing the linguistic strategies that supported it seemed to me the most urgent, fruitful, challenging work a writer could take on.