Naturally all of them had a sad story: too much notice, not enough, or the worst kind. Some tale about dragon daddies and false-hearted men, or mean mamas and friends who did them wrong. Each story ha...
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.
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.
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...
The best thing she was, was her children.
Her passions were narrow but deep.
Violet learned then what she had forgotten until this moment: that laughter is serious. More complicated, more serious than tears.
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...
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,...
Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
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.
From the windows, through the fur of snow, the landscape became more melancholy when the sun successfully brightened the quiet trees, unable to speak without their leaves.
Outside, snow solidified itself into graceful forms. The peace of winter stars seemed permanent.
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...
This here Sethe talked about love like any other woman; talked about baby clothes like any other woman, but what she meant could cleave the bone. This here Sethe talked about safety with a handsaw. Th...
I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.