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But Jude,' She Would Say, 'you Knew Me. All Those Days And Years, Jude, You Knew Me. My Ways And My Hands And How My Stomach Folded And How We Tried To Get Mickey To Nurse And How About That Time When The Landlord Said...but You Said...and I Cried, Jude. You Knew Me And Had Listened To The Things I Said In The Night, And Heard Me In The Bathroom And Laughed At My Raggedy Girdle And I Laughed Too Because I Knew You Too, Jude. So How Could You Leave Me When You Knew Me?

-Toni Morrison

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But Jude,' She Would

Toni Morrison

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But Jude,' She Would Say, 'you Knew Me. All Those Days And Years, Jude, You Knew Me. My Ways And My Hands And How My Stomach Folded And How We Tried To Get Mickey To Nurse And How About That Time When The Landlord Said...but You Said...and I Cried, Jude. You Knew Me And Had Listened To The Things I Said In The Night, And Heard Me In The Bathroom And Laughed At My Raggedy Girdle And I Laughed Too Because I Knew You Too, Jude. So How Could You Leave Me When You Knew Me?

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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.

Jealousy We Understood And Thought Natural... But Envy Was A Strange, New Feeling For Us. And All The Time We Knew That Maureen Peal Was Not The Enemy And Not Worthy Of Such Intense Hatred. The Thing To Fear Was The Thing That Made Her Beautiful, And Not Us.

Like Any Artist Without An Art Form, She Became Dangerous.

It's A Bad Word, 'belong.' Especially When You Put It With Somebody You Love ... You Can't Own A Human Being.

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Native American

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Here I Am Not The One To Throw Out. No One Steals My Warmth And Shoes Because I Am Small. No One Handles My Backside. No One Whinnies Like Sheep Or Goat Because I Drop In Fear And Weakness. No One Screams At The Sight Of Me. No One Watches My Body For How It Is Unseemly. With You My Body Is Pleasure Is Safe Is Belonging. I Can Never Not Have You Have Me.

The Habit Of Getting Up Early, Which I Had Formed When The Children Were Young, Now Became My Choice. I Am Not Very Bright Or Very Witty Or Very Inventive After The Sun Goes Down.

I Think Women Dwell Quite A Bit On The Duress Under Which They Work, On How Hard It Is Just To Do It At All. We Are Traditionally Rather Proud Of Ourselves For Having Slipped Creative Work In There Between The Domestic Chores And Obligations. I'm Not Sure We Deserve Such Big A-pluses For All That.

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 Write The Way Women Have Babies. You Don't Know It's Going To Be Like That. If You Did, There's No Way You Would Go Through With It.

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Make A Difference About Something Other Than Yourselves.

Beauty Was Not Simply Something To Behold; It Was Something One Could Do.

If I’d A Knowed More, I Would A Loved More.

And They Beat. The Women For Having Known Them And No More, No More; The Children For Having Been Them But Never Again. They Killed A Boss So Often And So Completely They Had To Bring Him Back To Life To Pulp Him One More Time. Tasting Hot Mealcake Among Pine Trees, They Beat It Away. Singing Love Songs To Mr. Death, They Smashed His Head. More Than The Rest, They Killed The Flirt Whom Folks Called Life For Leading Them On.

The Enemy Is Not Men. The Enemy Is The Concept Of Patriarchy, The Concept Of Patriarchy As The Way To Run The World Or Do Things.

Black Women Have Always Been Friends. I Mean, If You Didn't Have Each Other You Had Nothing.

The Function Of Freedom Is To Free Someone Else.

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Intimacy Is Extremely Important To Me And I Want It To Be Extremely Important To The Readers.

In Order To Be As Free As I Possibly Can, In My Own Imagination, I Can't Take Positions That Are Closed. Everything I've Ever Done, In The Writing World, Has Been To Expand Articulation, Rather Than To Close It, To Open Doors, Sometimes, Not Even Closing The Book -- Leaving The Endings Open For Reinterpretation, Revisitation, A Little Ambiguity.

But To Find Out The Truth About How Dreams Die, One Should Never Take The Word Of The Dreamer.

Sometimes The Names Were Humiliating, Deliberately So. Somebody Would Pick Out Your Flaw. If You Were Little, They Would Call You Shorty. And If You Were Angry, They Would Call You The Devil.

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Nelson Mandela Is, For Me, The Single Statesman In The World. The Single Statesman, In That Literal Sense, Who Is Not Solving All His Problems With Guns. It's Truly Unbelievable.

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Everybody Gets Everything Handed To Them. The Rich Inherit It. I Don't Mean Just Inheritance Of Money. I Mean What People Take For Granted Among The Middle And Upper Classes, Which Is Nepotism, The Old-boy Network.

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Don't Ever Think I Fell For You, Or Fell Over You. I Didn't Fall In Love, I Rose In It.

Make A Difference, Does It? You Stay The Night Here Snake Get You.

For Lo, The Winter Is Past, The Rain Is Over And Gone; The Flowers Appear On The Earth; The Time Of The Singing Of Birds Is Come, And The Voice Of The Turtledove Is Heard In Our Land.

But Her Brain Was Not Interested In The Future. Loaded With The Past And Hungry For More, It Left Her No Room To Imagine, Let Alone Plan For, The Next Day.

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One Of The Monstrous Things That Slavery In This Country Caused Was The Breakup Of Families. I Mean, Physical Labor, Horrible; Beatings, Horrible; Lynching Death, All Of That, Horrible. But The Living Life Of A Parent Who, A, Has No Control Over What Happens To Your Children, None. They Don't Belong To You. You May Not Even Nurse Them. They May Be Shipped Off Somewhere, As In "beloved" The Mother Was, To Be Nursed By Somebody Who Was Not Able To Work In The Fields And Was A Wet Nurse.

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I'm Losing The Definition Now Of Politics. I Sort Of Don't Know What That Is Anymore. People Say Politically Correct, I Don't Know What That Means. I Know What They Think They Mean.

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Black And White

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Love Is Divine Only And Difficult Always. If You Think It Is Easy You Are A Fool. If You Think It Is Natural You Are Blind. It Is A Learned Application Without Reason Or Motive Except That It Is God.

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She Learned The Intricacy Of Loneliness: The Horror Of Color, The Roar Of Soundlessness And The Menace Of Familiar Objects Lying Still.

I Don't Wait To Be Struck By Lightning And I Don't Need Certain Slants Of Light In Order To Be Able To Write.

A Dead Language Is Not Only One No Longer Spoken Or Written, It Is Unyielding Language Content To Admire Its Own Paralysis. Like Statist Language, Censored And Censoring. Ruthless In Its Policing Duties, It Has No Desire Or Purpose Other Than Maintaining The Free Range Of Its Own Narcotic Narcissism, Its Own Exclusivity And Dominance. However Moribund, It Is Not Without Effect For It Actively Thwarts The Intellect, Stalls Conscience, Suppresses Human Potential. Unreceptive To Interrogation, It Cannot Form Or Tolerate New Ideas, Shape Other Thoughts, Tell Another Story, Fill Baffling Silences.

The Pieces I Am, She Gather Them And Gave Them Back To Me In All The Right Order.

...she Needed To Confirm Its Presence. Like The Keeper Of The Lighthouse And The Prisoner, She Regarded It As A Mooring, A Checkpoint, Some Stable Visual Object That Assured Her That The World Was Still There; That This Was Like And Not A Dream. That She Was Alive Somewhere, Inside, Which She Acknowledged To Be True Only Because A Thing She Knew Intimately Was Out There, Outside Of Herself.

Evil Is So Seductive. It Needs To Grind You Up And Make You Its Slave.

When You First Start Writing-and I Think It's True For A Lot Of Beginning Writers-you're Scared To Death That If You Don't Get That Sentence Right That Minute It's Never Going To Show Up Again. And It Isn't. But It Doesn't Matter-another One Will, And It'll Probably Be Better. And I Don't Mind Writing Badly For A Couple Of Days Because I Know I Can Fix It-and Fix It Again And Again And Again, And It Will Be Better.

Let Your Face Speak What's In Your Heart.

And I Am All The Things I Have Ever Loved: Scuppernong Wine, Cool Baptisms In Silent Water, Dream Books And Number Playing.

More Than Fear Of Loving Bears Or Birds Bigger Than Cows, I Fear Pathless Nights. How, I Wonder, Can I Find You In The Dark?

Shallow Believers Prefer A Shallow God.

Please Don't Settle For Happiness. It's Not Good Enough. Of Course You Deserve It, But If That's All You Have In Mind - Happiness - I Want To Suggest To You That Personal Success Devoid Of Meaningfulness, Free Of A Steady Commitment To Social Justice - That's More Than A Barren Life. It's A Trivial One.

Not Good Enough

...the Change Was Adjustment Without Improvement.

Anger... It's A Paralyzing Emotion... You Can't Get Anything Done.

Our Ancestors Are An Ever Widening Circle Of Hope.

You Rely On A Sentence To Say More Than The Denotation And The Connotation; You Revel In The Smoke That The Words Send Up.

He Said, 'always. Always.

Sweet, She Thought. He Must Think I Can't Bear To Hear Him Say It. That After All I Have Told Him And After Telling Me How Many Feet I Have, "goodbye" Would Break Me To Pieces. Ain't That Sweet. "so Long," She Murmured From The Far Side Of The Trees.

I Am In The Position Of Judging People By The Best They've Ever Done Rather Than The Worst.

At Some Point In Life, The World's Beauty Becomes Enough.

I Don't Think Anybody Cares About Unwed Mothers Unless They're Black Or Poor. The Question Is Not Morality, The Question Is Money. That's What We're Upset About.

I Don't Think A Female Running A House Is A Problem, A Broken Family. It's Perceived As One Because Of The Notion That A Head Is A Man.

There Is No Such Thing As Race. None. There Is Just A Human Race - Scientifically, Anthropologically. Racism Is A Construct, A Social Construct... It Has A Social Function, Racism.

Love Just Seems To Make Life Not Just Livable, But A Gallant, Gallant Event.

The Screams Of A Hurt Woman Were Indistinguishable From Everyday Traffic.

Wait, Wait, Wait, Wait. Don't Try To Write Through It, To Force It. Many Do, But That Won't Work. Just Wait, It Will Come.

When You Think Of Sexual Liberation, Which Women Wanted To Have Or Not Have Children, Which Is The Choice, Not A Command, And Other Kinds Of Things They Wanted In Their Relationships With Their Husbands, Or Partners Or What Have You, Became For Subsequent Generations Some License That They Themselves Feel, That Is Absolutely Demeaning And Mean Younger And Younger And Younger.

Anything I Have Ever Learned Of Any Consequence, I Have Learned From Black People. I Have Never Been Bored By Any Black Person, Ever.

To Get To A Place Where You Could Love Anything You Chose--not To Need Permission For Desire--well Now _that_ Was Freedom.

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 Love Just A Little Bit, So When They Broke Its Back, Or Shoved It In A Croaker Sack, Well, Maybe You'd Have A Little Love Left Over For The Next One.

Everywhere, Everywhere, Children Are The Scorned People Of The Earth.

Black People Are Victims Of An Enormous Amount Of Violence. None Of Those Things Can Take Place Without The Complicity Of The People Who Run The Schools And The City.

I Think There's Data, And Then There's Information That Comes From Data, And Then There's Knowledge That Comes From Information. And Then, After Knowledge, There Is Wisdom. I Am Interested In How To Get From Data To Wisdom.

Now What? All The Battles Feminists Won About Not Being A Sex Object, Not Being Evaluated Based On These Things, That Now Other Generations Are Wallowing In, The Extremes They Go To, To Look Sexually Attractive? It's Stunning How Things That One Fought Desperately For Are Just Being Tossed Aside With Aplomb.

The Best Art Is Political And You Ought To Be Able To Make It Unquestionably Political And Irrevocably Beautiful At The Same Time.

How Soon Country People Forget. When They Fall In Love With A City It Is Forever, And It Is Like Forever. As Though There Never Was A Time When They Didn't Love It. The Minute They Arrive At The Train Station Or Get Off The Ferry And Glimpse The Wide Streets And The Wasteful Lamps Lighting Them, They Know They Are Born For It. There, In A City, They Are Not So Much New As Themselves: Their Stronger, Riskier Selves.

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Some Literature Is Knowledge, Some Is Just Data. But If I Can Get A "happy" Ending - Which Is When For The Characters I'm Writing About, Something Happens That They Move From Wherever They Are In The Beginning To Knowledge Or Wisdom, They Know Something They Never Would Have Acknowledged Or Realized If It Hadn't Been For My Book - That For Me Is What Literature Does.

When You Stiffen, You Know That Whatever You Stiffen About Is Very Important. The Stuff Is Important, The Fear Itself Is Information.

It Seems To Me Everything Shakespeare Did Was Political.

She Left Me The Way People Leave A Hotel Room. A Hotel Room Is A Place To Be When You Are Doing Something Else. Of Itself It Is Of No Consequence To One's Major Scheme. A Hotel Room Is Convenient. But Its Convenience Is Limited To The Time You Need It While You Are In That Particular Town On That Particular Business; You Hope It Is Comfortable, But Prefer, Rather, That It Be Anoymous. It Is Not, After All, Where You Live.

And Fantasy It Was, For We Were Not Strong, Only Aggressive; We Were Not Free, Merely Licensed; We Were Not Compassionate, We Were Polite; Not Good, But Well Behaved. We Courted Death In Order To Call Ourselves Brave, And Hid Like Thieves From Life. We Substituted Good Grammar For Intellect; We Switched Habits To Simulate Maturity; We Rearranged Lies And Called It Truth, Seeing In The New Pattern Of An Old Idea The Revelation And The Word.

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The Children - I Call Them Children When They're Under 18 - Are Hungry For That Love. The Drugs Are Just A Sleep That You Can't Even Wake Up From, Because You Might Remember What You Did When You Were There. There's No Place For Them - There Should Be A Rehabilitation Center On Every Corner, Along With Mcdonald's And The Banks. This Is Serious Business. The Waiting Lists Are Incredible. I Mean, It's Terrible. It's Really Terrible.

Alice Thought, No. It Wasn't The War And The Disgruntled Veterans; It Wasn't The Droves And Droves Of Colored People Flocking To Paychecks And Streets Full Of Themselves. It Was The Music. The Dirty, Get-on-down Music The Women Sang And The Men Played And Both Danced To, Close And Shamelesss Or Apart And Wild...it Made You Do Unwise Disorderly Things. Just Hearing It Was Like Violating The Law.

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What Difference Do It Make If The Thing You Scared Of Is Real Or Not?

I Sometimes Lose Interest In The Characters And Get Much More Interested In The Trees And Animals.

From My Point Of View, Your Life Is Already A Miracle Of Chance Waiting For You To Shape Its Destiny.

I Remember A Very Important Lesson That My Father Gave Me When I Was Twelve Or Thirteen. He Said, "you Know, Today I Welded A Perfect Seam And I Signed My Name To It." And I Said, "but, Daddy, No One's Going To See It!" And He Said, "yeah, But I Know It's There." So When I Was Working In Kitchens, I Did Good Work.

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Books Are A Form Of Political Action. Books Are Knowledge. Books Are Reflection. Books Change Your Mind.

Guileless And Without Vanity,we Were Still In Love With Ourselves Then. We Felt Comfortable In Our Own Skins, Enjoyed The News That Our Senses Released To Us, Admired Our Dirt, Cultivated Our Scars, And Could Not Comprehend This Unworthiness.

There Is No Time For Despair, No Place For Self-pity, No Need For Silence, No Room For Fear. We Speak, We Write, We Do Language. That Is How Civilizations Heal.

You Looking Good." "devil's Confusion. He Lets Me Look Good Long As I Feel Bad.

[obama Is ] Creative Imagination Which Coupled With Brilliance Equals Wisdom . . . [he Is] The Man For This Time.

They Encouraged You To Put Some Of Your Weight In Their Hands And Soon As You Felt How Light And Lovely It Was, They Studied Your Scars And Tribulations.

All Art Is Knowing When To Stop.

I'm Not Entangled In Shaping My Work According To Other People's Views Of How I Should Have Done It.

I Know What Every Colored Woman In This Country Is Doing... Dying. Just Like Me. But The Difference Is They Dying Like A Stump. Me, I’m Going Down Like One Of Those Redwoods. I Sure Did Live In This World.

Can't Nothing Heal Without Pain, You Know.

Now He Knew Why He Loved Her So. Without Ever Leaving The Ground, She Could Fly. 'there Must Be Another One Like You,' He Whispered To Her. 'there's Got To Be At Least One More Woman Like You.

Movements Toward Freedom And The Self-respect That Comes From Something Other Than What People Think Is Their Most Important Feature.

The Formula For Creative Writing In High School Or College Is Write What You Know. And I Said They Don't Know Nothing. Imagine Something. Do You Know What It's Like To Be A Madame In Paris, When You're Too Old To Have Any Clients. No, You Don't. I Don't Either. Write About It.

Race Is The Least Reliable Information You Can Have About Someone. It's Real Information, But It Tells You Next To Nothing.

In Becoming An American, From Europe, What One Has In Common With That Other Immigrant Is Contempt For Me-it's Nothing Else But Color.

As You Enter Positions Of Trust And Power, Dream A Little Before You Think.

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.

Let Your Face Speak What's In Your Heart. When My Kids Walk In The Room My Face Says I'm Glad To See Them.

True The Black Woman Did The Housework, The Drudgery; True, She Reared The Children, Often Alone, But She Did All Of That While Occupying A Place On The Job Market, A Place Her Mate Could Not Get Or Which His Pride Would Not Let Him Accept.and She Had Nothing To Fall Back On: Not Maleness, Not Whiteness, Not Ladyhood, Not Anything. And Out Of The Profound Desolation Of Her Reality She May Very Well Have Invented Herself.

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If A Negro Got Legs He Ought To Use Them. Sit Down Too Long, Somebody Will Figure Out A Way To Tie Them Up.

You Been Gone Too Long, Sula. Not Too Long, But Maybe Too Far.

Black Literature Is Taught As Sociology, As Tolerance, Not As A Serious, Rigorous Art Form.

African American

There Is Nothing Of Any Consequence In Education, In The Economy, In City Planning, In Social Policy That Does Not Concern Black People.

Sweet, Crazy Conversations Full Of Half Sentences, Daydreams And Misunderstandings More Thrilling Than Understanding Could Ever Be.

I Don't Do The Things Other People Call "play."

When She Awoke There Was A Melody In Her Head She Could Not Identify Or Recall Ever Hearing Before. 'perhaps I Made It Up,' She Thought. Then It Came To Her - The Name Of The Song And All Its Lyrics Just As She Had Heard It Many Times Before. She Sat On The Edge Of The Bed Thinking, 'there Aren't Any More New Songs And I Have Sung All The Ones There Are. I Have Sung Them All. I Have Sung All The Songs There Are.

Which Was What Love Was: Unmotivated Respect.

Adults, Older Girls, Shops, Magazines, Newspapers, Window Signsall The World Had Agreed That A Blue-eyed, Yellow-haired, Pink-skinned Doll Was What Every Girl Child Treasured

Sunk In The Grass Of An Empty Lot On A Spring Saturday, I Split The Stems Of Milkweed And Thought About Ants And Peach Pits And Death And Where The World Went When I Closed My Eyes.

A Sister Can Be Seen As Someone Who Is Both Ourselves And Very Much Not Ourselves - A Special Kind Of Double.

I Want To Discourage You From Choosing Anything Or Making Any Decision Simply Because It Is Safe. Things Of Value Seldom Are

Access To Knowledge Is The Superb, The Supreme Act Of Truly Great Civilizations. Of All The Institutions That Purport To Do This, Free Libraries Stand Virtually Alone In Accomplishing This Mission. No Committee Decides Who May Enter, No Crisis Of Body Or Spirit Must Accompany The Entrant. No Tuition Is Charged, No Oath Sworn, No Visa Demanded. Of The Monuments Humans Build For Themselves, Very Few Say - Touch Me, Use Me, My Hush Is Not Indifference, My Space Is Not Barrier. If I Inspire Awe, It Is Because I Am In Awe Of You And The Possibilities That Dwell In You.

Write About Something You Don't Know. And Don't Be Scared, Ever.

As A Writer Reading, I Came To Realize The Obvious: The Subject Of The Dream Is The Dreamer.

I Don't Know Whether The Bird You Are Holding Is Dead Or Alive, But What I Do Know Is That It Is In Your Hands. It Is In Your Hands.

At Some Point In Life The World's Beauty Becomes Enough. You Don't Need To Photograph, Paint Or Even Remember It. It Is Enough. No Record Of It Needs To Be Kept And You Don't Need Someone To Share It With Or Tell It To. When That Happens — That Letting Go — You Let Go Because You Can.

I Couldn't Bear To Have People Mispronounce My Name. But The Person I Was Was This Person Who Was Called Chloe.

There Is Really Nothing More To Say - Except Why. But Since Why Is Difficult To Handle, One Must Take Refuge In How.

Literature, It Seems To Me, Is Wisdom.

If He Looked Into Her Face, He Would See Those Haunted, Loving Eyes. The Hauntedness Would Irritate Him - The Love Would Move Him To Fury. How Dare She Love Him? Hadn't She Any Sense At All? What Was He Supposed To Do About That? Return It? How? What Could His Calloused Hands Produce To Make Her Smile? What Of His Knowledge Of The World And Of Life Could Be Useful To Her? What Could His Heavy Arms And Befuddled Brain Accomplish That Would Earn Him His Own Respect, That Would In Turn Allow Him To Accept Her Love?

Listening To The Doves In Alfred, Georgia, And Having Neither The Right Nor The Permission To Enjoy It Because In That Place Mist, Doves, Sunlight, Copper Dirt, Moon-everything Belonged To The Men Who Had The Guns. . . . So You Protected Yourself And Loved Small. . . . A Woman, A Child, A Brother-a Big Love Like That Would Split You Wide Open In Alfred, Georgia. . . . To Get To A Place Where You Could Love Anything You Chose-not To Need Permission For Desire-well Now, That Was Freedom

How Exquisitely Human Was The Wish For Permanent Happiness, And How Thin Human Imagination Became Trying To Achieve It.

Freeing Yourself Was One Thing; Claiming Ownership Of That Freed Self Was Another.

Anything Dead Coming Back To Life Hurts.

It Hit Her Like A Sledgehammer, And It Was Then That She Knew What To Feel. A Liquid Trail Of Hate Flooded Her Chest. Knowing That She Would Hate Him Long And Well Filled Her With Pleasant Anticipation, Like When You Know You Are Going To Fall In Love With Someone And You Wait For The Happy Signs. Hating Boyboy, She Could Get On With It, And Have The Safety, The Thrill, The Consistency Of That Hatred As Long As She Wanted Or Needed It To Define And Strengthen Her Or Protect Her From Routine Vulnerabilities.

Falling In Love

To Be Given Dominion Over Another Is A Hard Thing; To Wrest Dominion Over Another Is A Wrong Thing; To Give Dominion Of Yourself To Another Is A Wicked Thing.

When A Man Angers You, He Conquers You.

I Really Think The Range Of Emotions And Perceptions I Have Had Access To As A Black Person And As A Female Person Are Greater Than Those Of People Who Are Neither.... So It Seems To Me That My World Did Not Shrink Because I Was A Black Female Writer. It Just Got Bigger.

Womanists Is What Black Feminists Used To Call Themselves. Very Much So. They Were Not The Same Thing. And Also The Relationship With Men. Historically, Black Women Have Always Sheltered Their Men Because They Were Out There, And They Were The Ones That Were Most Likely To Be Killed.

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 The Shade To Taste Their Lip Sweat And Contemplate The Wildness That Had Come Upon Them So Suddenly

Women's Rights Is Not Only An Abstraction, A Cause; It Is Also A Personal Affair. It Is Not Only About Us; It Is Also About Me And You. Just The Two Of Us.

The Vitality Of Language Lies In Its Ability To Limn The Actual, Imagined And Possible Lives Of Its Speakers, Readers, Writers.

No Matter What All Your Teeth And Wet Fingers Anticipated, There Was No Accounting For The Way That Simple Joy Could Shake You.

Most Of Our Lives Are Spent In Little Towns, Little Towns All Throughout The Country. That's Where We Live. And That's Where The Juices Come From And That's Where We Made It, Not Made It In Terms Of Success But Made Who We Are.

The Concept Of Physical Beauty As A Virtue Is One Of The Dumbest, Most Pernicious And Destructive Ideas Of The Western World, And We Should Have Nothing To Do With It.

Two Parents Can't Raise A Child Any More Than One. You Need A Whole Community - Everybody - To Raise A Child. And The Little Nuclear Family Is A Paradigm That Just Doesn't Work. It Doesn't Work For White People Or For Black People. Why Are We Hanging Onto It, I Don't Know. It Isolates People Into Little Units - People Need A Larger Unit.

...a Habit That Had Become One Of Those Necessary Things For The Night... Surely A Body-friendly If Not Familiar-lying Next To You. Someone Whose Touch Is A Reassurance, Not An Affront Or A Nuissance. Whose Heavy Breathing Neither Enrages Nor Discusts You, But Amuses You Like That Of A Cherished Pet.

Grab This Land! Take It, Hold It, My Brothers, Make It, My Brothers, Shake It, Squeeze It, Turn It, Twist It, Beat It, Kick It, Kiss It, Whip It, Stomp It, Dig It, Plow It, Seed It, Reap It, Rent It, Buy It, Sell It, Own It, Build It, Multiply It, And Pass It On — Can You Hear Me? Pass It On!

If Writing Is Thinking And Discovery And Selection And Order And Meaning, It Is Also Awe And Reverence And Mystery And Magic.

Well, Feel This, Why Don't You? Feel How It Feels To Have A Bed To Sleep In And Somebody There Not Worrying You To Death About What You Got To Do Each Day To Deserve It. Feel How That Feels. And If That Don't Get It, Feel How It Feels To Be A Colored Woman Roaming The Roads With Anything God Made Liable To Jump On You. Feel That.

If You Take Racism Away From Certain People - I Mean, Vitriolic Racism As Well As The Sort Of Social Racist - If You Take That Away, They May Have To Face Something Really Terrible, Misery, Self-misery, And Deep Pain About Who They Are.

Along With The Idea Of Romantic Love, She Was Introduced To Another - Physical Beauty. Probably The Most Destructive Ideas In The History Of Human Thought. Both Originated In Envy, Thrived In Insecurity, And Ended In Disillusion.

I Always Looked Upon The Acts Of Racist Exclusion, Or Insult, As Pitiable, From The Other Person. I Never Absorbed That. I Always Thought That There Was Something Deficient About Such People.

One Of My Kids Was Born In 1968. There Were Going To Be Political Difficulties, But They Were Never Going To Have That Level Of Hatred And Contempt That My Brothers And My Sister And Myself Were Exposed To.

The Presence Of Evil Was Something To Be First Recognized, Then Dealt With, Survived, Outwitted, Triumphed Over.

Oppressive Language Does More Than Represent Violence; It Is Violence; Does More Than Represent The Limits Of Knowledge; It Limits Knowledge.

A Dream Is Just A Nightmare With Lipstick.

Sometimes What I Write On The Page Frightens Me, So I Feel Free When I Write, But I Don't Feel Safe.

You Got Two Feet, Sethe, Not Four." He Said, And Right Then A Forest Sprang Up Between Them; Tactless And Quiet.

Love Is Never Any Better Than The Lover.

Beginning 'beloved' With Numerals Rather Than Spelled Out Numbers, It Was My Intention To Give The House An Identity Separate From The Street Or Even The City.

I Have Difficulties With Contemporary Language. Big Difficulties. I Counted, You Know, Something Like 160 Words Have Disappeared From The English Language Because Of The Use Of The Word "like." "i'm Like, He's Like" - Not "thought," Not "as If ."

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