I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies.
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.
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.