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.
You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.
Language can never ‘pin down’ slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.
A coward with a gun is the most dangerous person in the world.
Write about something you don’t know. And don’t be scared, ever.
If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.
Listen up. Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.
Movements toward freedom and the self-respect that comes from something other than what people think is their most important feature.