They did not believe death was accidental - life might be, but death was deliberate.
Nothing could be taken for granted. Women who loved you tried to cut your throat, while women who didn't even know your name scrubbed your back. Witches could sound like Katharine Hepburn and your bes...
Milkman could hardly breathe. Hagar's voice scooped up what little pieces of heart he had left to call his own.
Love is divine only and difficult always.
Lonely, ain't it?Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.
In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes;...
Imagine something. Something that fits in the dark. Say the dark is the sky at night. Imagine something in it.A star?Yes.I can’t. I can’t see it.Okay. Don’t try to see it. Try to be it. Would you like...
Everything depends on knowing how much, she said, and Good is knowing when to stop.
All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pai...
We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writer's movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious.
I want to remind us all that art is dangerous. I want to remind you of the history of artists who have been murdered, slaughtered, imprisoned, chopped up, refused entrance. The history of art, whether...
What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.
You got two feet, Sethe, not four. he said, and right then a forest sprang up between them; tactless and quiet.
You your best thing, Sethe. You are.
When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.''I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.
There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.
Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to...
No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.
It sounded old. Old and tired and beaten to death. Deserve. Now it seemed to him that he was always saying or thinking that he didn't deserve some bad luck, or some bad treatment from others. He'd to...
I've traveled. All over. I've never seen anything like you. How could anything be put together like you? Do you know how beautiful you are? Have you looked at yourself?''I'm looking now.