Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.
It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.
It was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman*
If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.
All she saw, down in the cellar well beneath the stoop, was a light yellow feather with a tip of green. And she had never named him. Had called him my parrot all these years. My parrot. Love you. Love...
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.
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...
Unless carefree, mother love was a killer.
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...
There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks
Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.
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...
Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
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...
Passion is never enough neither is skill.
Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.
All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
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...