It’s uh known fact, Pheoby, you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo’ papa and yo’ mama and nobody else can’t tell yuh and show yuh. Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
All my skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.
Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!
Bitterness is the coward’s revenge on the world for having been hurt.
It is a curious thing to be a woman in the Caribbean after you have been a woman in these United States.
If you haven’t got it, you can’t show it. If you have got it, you can’t hide it.
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me.
I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms.
I love myself when I am laughing.
A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.
Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.
Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.
I did not just fall in love. I made a parachute jump.
If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding.
Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at the sun.’ We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.