I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.
I’m interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.
Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.
For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.
I write the way women have babies. You don’t know it’s going to be like that. If you did, there’s no way you would go through with it.
Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
Who’s Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? The Lion or the Mouse? Poppy or the Snake?
My home is such a powerfully imaginative place that the space is almost irrelevant. I think the house I live at on the Hudson is where I belong because it’s the only place where I am that I never think about when I’m leaving.
The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia.
Sweet, she thought. He must think I can’t bear to hear him say it. That after all I have told him and after telling me how many feet I have, “goodbye” would break me to pieces. Ain’t that sweet. “So long,” she murmured from the far side of the trees.
The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.
Which was what love was: unmotivated respect.
Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission.
Shallow believers prefer a shallow God.
Most of our lives are spent in little towns, little towns all throughout the country. That’s where we live. And that’s where the juices come from and that’s where we made it, not made it in terms of success but made who we are.
Deep, deep trouble. Can’t rival the dead for love. Lose every time.
When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do.
A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment.
You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.