I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ’em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.
I tell my students there is such a thing as ‘writer’s block,’ and they should respect it. You shouldn’t write through it. It’s blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven’t got it right now.
American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.
Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.
If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.
We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.
Not knowing it was hard; knowing it was harder.
Laughter is more serious than tears.
Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.
I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can’t teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.
Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.
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.