We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know.
All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
I began to realize that this idea of the lighter the better and the darker the worse was really – had an impact on sororities, on friendships, on all sorts of things, and it was stunning to me.
No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That’s a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.
The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader.
Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen – not vagrants – hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him.
All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.
I thought the whole world was like Lorain.
Women’s rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.
There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
I don’t work. I keep telling people I’m unemployed. And I don’t wash dishes, and I don’t wash clothes, and I don’t clean my house. Somebody else does that.
Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live.
Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God.
Something that is loved is never lost.
Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another – physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.
I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don’t have answers to.
Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown. In my heart it don’t mean a thing.