A child. New life. Immune to evil or illness, protected from kidnap, beatings, rape, racism, insult, hurt, self-loathing, abandonment. Error-free. All goodness. Minus wrath. So they believe.
I didn't plan on either children or writing. Once I realized that writing satisfied me in some enormous way, I had to make adjustments. The writing was always marginal in terms of time when the childr...
I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.
They ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four locked trees which promised cooling; they flung themselves into...
The human body is robust. It can gather strength when it's in mortal danger.
Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm. Mourning the split trees, hens starving on rooftops. Figurin...
Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.
It was a fine cry - loud and long - but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.
Adults do not talk to us—they give us directions. They issue orders without providing information.
If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.
All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
Misery don't call ahead. That's why you have to stay awake - otherwise it just walks on in your door.
Lonely was much better than alone.
I was so sure it would happen. That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle.
Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.
You got a life? Live it! Live the motherfuckin life!
You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Someb...
You been gone too long, Sula.Not too long, but maybe too far.
They hooted and laughed all the way back to the car, teasing Milkman, egging him on to tell more about how scared he was. And he told them. Laughing too, hard, loud, and long. Really laughing, and he...