He was having an odd paternal rush, a blood surge that was also blood and was presently hunting through Howard's expansive intelligence to find words that would more effectively express something lik...
He promised them a class that would challenge their own beliefs about the redemptive humanity of what is commonly called 'Art'. 'Art is the Western myth,' announced Howard, for the sixth year in a row...
Even by the standards with which she is familiar, Liberia is exceptional. Three quarters of the population live below the poverty line—that’s one U.S. dollar a day—half are on less than fifty cents a...
Within our intimacy, I could not be a girl, nor could I be anyone's baby, I could only be a female human, and the sex I understood was of the kind between friends and equals, bracketing conversation,...
When all the time it was that grand tree, taking up half the garden with its roots and not allowing anything else to grow.
The wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
You go back and back and back and it’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It’s a f...
It’s about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a song, the soul of it, so that something real happens inside you when a man opens his mouth to sing, and don’t you wan...
Yet when I waved at those two girls I noticed I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that they were timeless symbols of girlhood, or of childish friendship.
When I showed her my well-worn copy of Stormy Weather she reacted in a way I hadn’t anticipated, she was offended by it—hurt, even. Why was everybody black? It was unkind, she said, to have only black...
There’s never any knowing—how am I to put it?—which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won’t have things hanging on it for ever. —E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread
The shit is not the shit, he repeated solemnly, the pigeon is the shit.
The Jackson gaffe, with its Oedipal violence (I want to cut his nuts out), is especially poignant because it goes to the heart of a generational conflict in the black community, concerning what we wil...
That feeling. That's the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea an...
She could not do distress. Anger was so much easier. And quicker and harder and better. If I start crying, I’ll never stop –you hear people say that; Kiki heard people say it all the time in the hospi...
Philosophy is listening to warbling posh boys, it is being more bored than you have ever been in your life, more bored than you thought it possible to be.
One strong man and one weak is a colony, Sapper Jones, said Samad.
My father was sent to get the shoes. The pink of the leather turned out to be a lighter shade than I'd hoped, it looked like the underside of a kitten, and the sole was a dirty gray cat's tongue, and...
It was like tag, but a girl was never It, only boys were It, girls simply ran and ran until we found ourselves cornered in some quiet spot, away from the eyes of dinner ladies and playground monitors,...
In 1822 freed American slaves (known as Americo-Liberians, or, colloquially, Congos) founded the colony at the instigation of the American Colonization Society, a coalition of slave owners and politic...