I’m crazy about this City. Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Be...
I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.
Gimme hate, Lord, he whimpered. I’ll take hate any day. But don’t give me love. I can’t take no more love, Lord. I can’t carry it...It’s too heavy. Jesus, you know, you know all about it. Ain’t it hea...
Geraldine, Louis, Junior, and the cat lived next to the playground of Washington Irving School. Junior considered the playground his own, and the schoolchildren coveted his freedom to sleep late, go h...
For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
Beloved, she my daughter. She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I don't have to explain a thing.
At least she’s willing to figure it out, do something, risk something and take its measure. I risk nothing. I sit on a throne and identify signs of imperfection in others.
As Reverend Deal moved into his sermon, the hands of the women unfolded like pairs of raven's wings and flew high above their hats in the air. They did not hear all of what he said;they heard the one...
Apparently he thought he deserved only to be loved--from a distance, though--and given what he wanted. And in return he would be . . . what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was: I a...
I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, for the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.
I get angry about things, then go on and work.
Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.
Young people, Lord. Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing there trembling? Whatever they call it, it leaps over anyth...
They had stared at her with great uncomprehending eyes. Eyes that questioned nothing and asked everything. Unblinking and unabashed, they stared up at her. The end of the world lay in their eyes, and...
The real hell of Hell is that it is forever.' Sula said that. She said doing anything forever and ever was hell.
The narrower their lives, the wider their hips.
The death of self-esteem can occur quickly, easily in children, before their ego has legs, so to speak. Couple the vulnerability of youth with indifferent parents, dismissive adults, and a world, whic...
So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die.
She did not tell them to clean up their lives, or go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek, or its glory-bound pure. She told them that the onl...