Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.
What do you know about somebody not being good enough for somebody else? And since when did you care whether Corinthians stood up or fell down? You've been laughing at us all your life. Corinthians. M...
There was a hint of spring in her sole green eyes, something summery in her complexion, and a rich autumn ripeness in her walk.
She was fierce in the presence of death, heroic even, as she was at no other time. Its threat gave her direction, clarity, audacity.
The best thing she was, was her children.
Her passions were narrow but deep.
Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. I...
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 p...
The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
He can't value you more than you value yourself.
Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one,...
In a way, her strangeness, her naivete, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings...
Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
Violet learned then what she had forgotten until this moment: that laughter is serious. More complicated, more serious than tears.
Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed, she said, and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.
You got a life? Live it! Live the motherfuckin life!
When warm weather came, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman, and child who could make it through, took her great heart to the Clearing--a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody...
What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.
You your own best thing, Sethe. You are.