Though it was such a bizarre world, filled only with the echoing voices of people who had apparently already agreed with each other.
Many learned things can be said about the Venus of Urbino but if you don’t open your eyes and recognize her first and foremost as an erotic object how can you claim that you’ve seen her at all?
Has never been hard for me to pay my taxes because I understand it to be the repaying of a large, in fact, an almost incalculable, debt.
For any daughter of hers was to do more than just survive—as my mother had—she was to thrive, learning many unnecessary skills, like tap dancing.
For a great dancer has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world, so that any dancer in any age may recognize him.
Certainly don’t write as a public service. But I am aware, at least as a reader, that remarkable acts of art-making—bold, perverse, unbeholden, free—have had the side effect of changing the weather in...
Because white novelists are not white novelists but simply novelists, and white characters are not white characters but simply human, and criticism of both is not partial or personal but a matter of a...
You could drown in memories like these, but she tried to swim free of them. She jumped over the small wall that fringed the Iqbal house, as she had a million times over, and rang the doorbell. Past te...
Yet Tracey was steadfast and loyal to his memory, far more likely to defend her absent father than I was to speak kindly of my wholly attentive one.
White free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights.
When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in an almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair and in the neither-this-nor-that beige of your skin - well, anyone can se...
When he returned he looked burdened, and without introducing the topic in any formal way, he began to talk to us about the inside, about how you found, when you were inside, that it wasn’t like the ne...
What? asked Natalie Blake. She really was too drunk to return to chambers. Her friend Layla was smiling, a little sadly. She was looking at the tablecloth. Nothing. You're exactly the same. Natalie wa...
What do we want from our mothers when we are children? Complete submission. Oh,
What do we want from our mothers when we are children? Complete submission. Oh, it's very nice and rational and respectable to say that a woman has every right to her life, to her ambitions, to her ne...
We knew that they, in their own time, had feared school, just as we did now, feared the arbitrary rules and felt shamed by them, by the new uniforms they couldn’t afford, the baffling obsession with q...
Unlike my mother, he had no anxiety in connection with her, he found her single-minded dedication to her dancing sweet, and also, I think, admirable- it appealed to his work ethic- and it was very cle...
USURY: Everybody's looking for the job in which you never have to pay anyone their pound of flesh. Self-employed nirvana. A lot of artists like to think of themselves as uncompromising; a lot of manag...
To her credit, though, Trace didn't lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman's art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use.
They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. ~ on children growing up...