I couldn’t bear to have people mispronounce my name. But the person I was was this person who was called Chloe.
I don’t think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It’s perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.
I get angry about things, then go on and work.
I guess I’m depressed. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. Part of it is the irritability of being 84, and part of it is being not as physically strong as I once was. And part of it is my misunderstanding, I think, of what’s going on in the world.
I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are.
Make a difference about something other than yourselves.
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge-even wisdom. Like art.
Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.
It was my father who could do no wrong. So I didn’t think of it as, oh, look, my father’s a violent man.
I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.
She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.
There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.
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.