There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.
What’s the world for you if you can’t make it up the way you want it?
If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
I dream a dream that dreams back at me.
I’m always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else’s contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we’re demons.
In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
I like marriage. The idea.
I’m not entangled in shaping my work according to other people’s views of how I should have done it.
One has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is rhythm and so on. So, it is what you don’t write that frequently gives what you do write its power.
I can’t explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn’t really be a writer.
To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.
Writing is really a way of thinking – not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.
You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up.
Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn’t have each other you had nothing.
No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along.
The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.
But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.
It had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping laugh. She had forgotten how deep and down it could be. So different from the miscellaneous giggles and smiles she had learned to be content with these past few years.