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.
I sang “O Holy Night” in a school choir. My mother came and listened to me and complimented me. So that was the high point. I cannot sing a note.
The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean.
I type in one place, but I write all over the house.
From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.
Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers – not the defined.
Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.
There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.