For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.
Liberation means you don’t have to be silenced.
Being able to laugh got me through.
An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
Nobody loved her and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.
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.
Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses – young loving.
People say to write about what you know. I’m here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don’t know anything. So write about something you don’t know. And don’t be scared, ever.
Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother’s voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.
Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
Can’t nothing heal without pain, you know.
I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.
Let your face speak what’s in your heart. When my kids walk in the room my face says I’m glad to see them.
Like Guitar in Son of Solomon, and Son in Tar Baby, he believed that harmony could never exist between the races.
When you stiffen, you know that whatever you stiffen about is very important. The stuff is important, the fear itself is information.
When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?
All art is knowing when to stop.
I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.
Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.
A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective; they are that.