New York is the last true city.
You need intelligence, and you need to look. You need a gaze, a wide gaze, penetrating and roving – thats what’s useful for art.
Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.
If you can’t count, they can cheat you. If you can’t read, they can beat you.
Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
The difference between that which is humane and that which is patriotic is a vital difference.
I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies.
Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It’s real information, but it tells you next to nothing.
Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.
You looked at me then like you knew me, and I thought it really was Eden, and I couldn’t take your eyes in because I was loving the hoof marks on your cheeks.
Love is divine only and difficult always.
In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.
When they fall in love with a city, it is for forever and it is like forever.
Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.
Lay my head on the railroad line. Train come along; pacify my mind.
It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds.
Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence.
But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day.
From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as something artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.
My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.