I used to think to think it was my rememory. You know. 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-...
How come it can't fly no better than a chicken?Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
Come see, I was thinking. Be the last thing you behold,
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...
A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.
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...
Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.'Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.
There's a difference between writing for a living and writing forlife. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises....
Then summer came. A summer limp with the weight of blossomed things. Heavy sunflowers weeping over fences; iris curling and browning at the edges far away from their purple hearts; ears of corn lettin...
The real hell of Hell is that it is forever.' Sula said that. She said doing anything forever and ever was hell.
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...
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
I don’t think many people appreciate silence or realize that it is as close to music as you can get.
Here I am not the one to throw out. No one steals my warmth and shoes because I am small. No one handles my backside. No one whinnies like sheep or goat because I drop in fear and weakness. No one scr...
Hate does that. Burns off everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemy's.
Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
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.