And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life.
I learned much later to worship her, just as I learned to delight in cleanliness, knowing, even as I learned, that the change was adjustment without improvement.
The threads of malice creeping toward him from Beloved’s side of the table were held harmless in the warmth of Sethe’s smile.
Michael was a purveyor of exotics, a typical anthropologist, a cultural orphan who sought other cultures he could love without risk or pain.
Solitude, competitiveness and grief are the unavoidable lot of a writer only when there is no organization or network to which he can turn.
I didn’t even know his name. And if I didn’t know his name then there is nothing I did know and I have known nothing ever at all since the one thing I wanted was to know his name so how could he help but leave me since he was making love to a woman who didn’t even know his name.
Hunched down in the small bright room Nel waited. Waited for the oldest cry. A scream not for others, not in sympathy for a burnt child, or a dead father, but a deeply personal cry for one’s own pain. A loud, strident: ‘Why me?’ She waited.
Lying on a ring of onion, a tomato slice exposed its seedy smile, one she remembers to this moment.
I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.
An editor is like a priest or a psychiatrist; if you get the wrong one then you are better off alone.
Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear.
We will be judged by how well we love.
They shoot the white girl first.
Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs – all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. “Here,” they said, “this is beautiful, and if you are on this day ‘worthy’ you may have it.
For a long time now he knew that anything could appear to b something else, and probably was.
Your life is already artful – waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.
The function of freedom is to free someone else.
I wanted to separate color from race. Distinguishing color – light, black, in-between – as the marker for race is really an error.
Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.