Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my remory, b...
Pain was greedy; it demanded all of her attention.
Oh, some of us loved her. The Maginot Line. And Cholly loved her. I'm sure he did. He, at any rate, was the one who loved her enough to touch her, envelope her, give something of her filled the matrix...
Lay my head on the railroad line. Train come along; pacify my mind.
I welcomed the circling sharks but they avoided me as if knowing I preferred their teeth to the chains around my neck my waist my ankles
He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. ‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers.‘Me? Me?
But then Job was a man. Invisibility was intolerable to men. What complaint would a female Job dare to put forth? And if, having done so, and He deigned to remind her of how weak and ignorant she was,...
Bryn Mawr had done what a four-year dose of liberal education was designed to do: unfit her for eighty percent of the useful work of the world.
Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
A shudder ran through Paul D. A bone-cold spasm that made him clutch his knees. He didn't know if it was bad whiskey, nights in the cellar, pig fever, iron bits, smiling roosters, fired feet, laughing...
Fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like.Could she sing? (Was it nice to hear when she did?) Was she pretty? Was she a good...
Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work writers do to...
It never occurred to us that the Earth itself might have been unyielding
In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
I'm a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I'm also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and an American, plus I'm an African-American, and a woman. I know it seems like I'm spreading like alga...
There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.
It's been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it's about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion.
You your best thing.
You are about to find out what it takes, how the world is, how it works and how it changes when you are a parent. Good luck and God help the child.