They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. A mood come alive. Words walking without master...
They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down.
The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if...
Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret w...
So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day.
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
Packed tight like a case of celery, only much darker than that. They were all against her, she could see. So many were there against her that a light slap from each one of them would have beat her to...
No, I do not weep at the world. I'm too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
Night came walking through Egypt swishing her black dress.
Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at the sun.' We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.
Light came to me when I realized that I did not have to consider any racial group as a whole. God made them duck by duck and that was the only way I could see them.
Janie, Ah hope God may kill me, if Ah’m lyin’. Nobody else on earth kin hold uh candle tuh you, baby. You got de keys to de kingdom.
It seemed to me that the human beings I met reacted pretty much the same to the same stimuli. Different idioms,yes. Circumstances and conditions having power to influence, yes. Inherent difference, no...
I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature so...
Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to...
He was the average mortal. It troubled him to get used to the world one way and then suddenly have it turn different.
Ah done lived Grandma’s way, now Ah means tuh live mine.
There is something about poverty that smells like death.
You saw a fluttering fan before her face and magnolia blooms and sleepy lakes under the moonlight when she walked.
This use of the vernacular became the fundamental framework for all but one of her novels and is particularly effective in her classic work Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, which is mo...