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I Know It's Trash: Just Another Story Made Up To Scare Wicked Females And Correct Unruly Children. But It's All I Have. I Know I Need Something Else. Something Better. Like A Story That Shows How Brazen Women Can Take A Good Man Down. I Can Hum To That.

-Toni Morrison

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I Know It's Trash:

Toni Morrison

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I Know It's Trash: Just Another Story Made Up To Scare Wicked Females And Correct Unruly Children. But It's All I Have. I Know I Need Something Else. Something Better. Like A Story That Shows How Brazen Women Can Take A Good Man Down. I Can Hum To That.

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...the City Is What They Want It To Be: Thriftless, Warm, Scary And Full Of Amiable Strangers. No Wonder They Forget Pebbly Creeks And When They Do Not Forget The Sky Completely Think Of It As A Tiny Piece Of Information About The Time Of Day Or Night.

All The Books That Were Being Published By African-american Guys Were Saying 'screw Whitey', Or Some Variation Of That. Not The Scholars But The Pop Books. And The Other Thing They Said Was, 'you Have To Confront The Oppressor.' I Understand That. But You Don't Have To Look At The World Through His Eyes. I'm Not A Stereotype; I'm Not Somebody Else's Version Of Who I Am. And So When People Said At That Time Black Is Beautiful – Yeah? Of Course. Who Said It Wasn't? So I Was Trying To Say, In The Bluest Eye, Wait A Minute. Guys. There Was A Time When Black Wasn't Beautiful. And You Hurt.

Your Life Is Already Artful-waiting, Just Waiting, For You To Make It Art.

Waiting For You

You Looked At Them And Wondered Why They Were So Ugly; You Looked Closely And Could Not Find The Source. Then You Realized That It Came From Conviction, Their Conviction. It Was As Though Some Mysterious All-knowing Master Had Given Each One A Cloak Of Ugliness To Wear, And They Had Each Accepted It Without Question.

I Merged Those Two Words, Black And Feminist, Because I Was Surrounded By Black Women Who Were Very Tough And And Who Always Assumed They Had To Work And Rear Children And Manage Homes.

We Mistook Violence For Passion, Indolence For Leisure, And Thought Recklessness Was Freedom.

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

It Seems To Me Everything Shakespeare Did Was Political.

Grown Don't Mean Nothing To A Mother. A Child Is A Child. They Get Bigger, Older, But Grown? What's That Supposed To Mean? In My Heart It Don't Mean A Thing.

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.

Never Did He Once Consider Directing His Hatred Toward The Hunters. Such An Emotion Would Have Destroyed Him ... His Subconscious Knew What His Min Did Not Guess-that Hating Them Would Have Consumed Him, Burned Him Up Like A Piece Of Soft Coal, Leaving Only Flakes Of Ash And A Question Mark Of Smoke.

The Nobel Prize Is The Best Thing That Can Happen To A Writer In Terms Of How It Affects Your Contracts, The Publishers, And The Seriousness With Which Your Work Is Taken. On The Other Hand, It Does Interfere With Your Private Life, Or It Can If You Let It, And It Has Zero Effect On The Writing. It Doesn't Help You Write Better And If You Let It, It Will Intimidate You About Future Projects.

All Paradises, All Utopias Are Designed By Who Is Not There, By The People Who Are Not Allowed In.

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

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.

...the Change Was Adjustment Without Improvement.

If You Surrendered To The Air, You Could Ride It.

Unpersecuted, Unjailed, Unharrassed Writers Are Trouble For The Ignorant Bully, The Sly Racist, And The Predators Feeding Off The World's Resources.

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

The Unflattering Reviews Are Painful For Short Periods Of Time; The Badly Written Ones Are Deeply, Deeply Insulting. That Reviewer Took No Time To Really Read The Book.

Nobody Loved Her And She Wouldn’t Have Liked It If They Had, She Considered Love A Serious Disability.

Long Before I Was A Success, My Parents Made Me Feel Like I Could Be One.

Liberation Means You Don't Have To Be Silenced.

I Think Some Aspects Of Writing Can Be Taught. Obviously, You Can't Teach Vision Or Talent. But You Can Help With Comfort.

I Think Being An Editor Really Helped Me Take Other People's Notes On My Writing. I'd Get A Note Like 'it's Too Wet' Or 'the First Couple Chapters Are Good, But Then The Rest Of The Pages Were So Wet That They Were Completely Illegible' Or 'did You Dip This In Sprite? This Smells Like Sprite. Why Would You Dip Your Novel In Sprite?' And Instead Of Pushing Back, I'd Listen. That's An Incredibly Important Skill For A Young Writer To Have.

Don’t Beg Anybody For Anything, Especially Love.

In Fact Her Maturity And Blood Kinship Converted Her Passion To Fever, So It Was More Affliction Than Affection. It Literally Knocked Her Down At Night, And Raised Her Up In The Morning, For When She Dragged Herself Off To Bed, Having Spent Another Day Without His Presence, Her Heart Beat Like A Gloved Fist Against Her Ribs. And In The Morning, Long Before She Was Fully Awake, She Felt A Longing So Bitter And Tight It Yanked Her Out Of A Sleep Swept Clean Of Dreams.

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.

What's The World For You If You Can't Make It Up The Way You Want It?

Birth, Life, And Death― Each Took Place On The Hidden Side Of A Leaf.

When They Fall In Love With A City, It Is For Forever And It Is Like Forever.

Falling In Love

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

Everything Depends On Knowing How Much,” She Said, And “good Is Knowing When To Stop.

If You Can't Count, They Can Cheat You. If You Can't Read, They Can Beat You.

I Don't Think I Knew Any Of My Father's Friends - Male Friends - By Their Real Names. I Remember Them Only By Their Nicknames.

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 ."

Freedom Is Choosing Your Responsibility. It's Not Having No Responsibilitie S; It's Choosing The Ones You Want.

You Need Intelligence, And You Need To Look. You Need A Gaze, A Wide Gaze, Penetrating And Roving - Thats What's Useful For Art.

The Hopelessness That Comes From Knowing Too Little And Feeling Too Much (so Brittle, So Dry He Is In Danger Of The Reverse: Feeling Nothing And Knowing Everything)

Knowing Everything

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

Hospitality Is Gold In This City; You Have To Be Clever To Figure Out How To Be Welcoming And Defensive At The Same Time. When To Love Something And When To Quit. If You Don't Know How, You Can End Up Out Of Control Or Controlled By Some Outside Thing Like That Hard Case Last Winter.

Evil Is Not Interesting. What Is It, Chopping Off Someone's Head? We Used To Do That As Kids, You Know, You Tear Up Paper Dolls And Stuff. I Know Everyone's Done It In The History Of The World, But Maybe Everybody Was Dumb And They Were Just Looking For Something Interesting To Do. What's Really Interesting And Hard Is Being Good.

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

Was It Hard? I Hope She Didn't Die Hard.' Sethe Shook Her Head. 'soft As Cream. Being Alive Was The Hard Part.

I Don't Think One Parent Can Raise A Child. I Don't Think Two Parents Can Raise A Child. You Really Need The Whole Village.

Her Mind Traveled Crooked Streets And Aimless Goat Paths, Arriving Sometimes At Profundity, Other Times At The Revelations Of A Three-year-old. Throughout This Fresh, If Common, Pursuit Of Knowledge, One Conviction Crowned Her Efforts: ...she Knew There Was Nothing To Fear.

The Peace I Am Thinking Of Is The Dance Of An Open Mind When It Engages Another Equally Open One.

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.

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

She Is A Friend Of Mind. She Gather Me, Man. The Pieces I Am, She Gather Them And Give Them Back To Me In All The Right Order. It's Good, You Know, When You Got A Woman Who Is A Friend Of Your Mind.

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

It's Important, Therefore, To Know Who The Real Enemy Is, And To Know The Function, The Very Serious Function Of Racism, Which Is Distraction. It Keeps You From Doing Your Work. It Keeps You Explaining Over And Over Again, Your Reason For Being. Somebody Says You Have No Language And So You Spend 20 Years Proving That You Do. Somebody Says Your Head Isn't Shaped Properly So You Have Scientists Working On The Fact That It Is. Someone Says You Have No Art So You Dredge That Up. Somebody Says You Have No Kingdoms And So You Dredge That Up. None Of That Is Necessary. There Will Always Be One More Thing.

He Said, 'always. Always.

I'm Interested In The Way In Which The Past Affects The Present And I Think That If We Understand A Good Deal More About History, We Automatically Understand A Great More About Contemporary Life.

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.

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.

Somebody Has To Take Responsibility For Being A Leader.

Taking Responsibility

Anything Dead Coming Back To Life Hurts.

I Tell My Students, 'when You Get These Jobs That You Have Been So Brilliantly Trained For, Just Remember That Your Real Job Is That If You Are Free, You Need To Free Somebody Else. If You Have Some Power, Then Your Job Is To Empower Somebody Else. This Is Not Just A Grab-bag Candy Game.

In Ohio Seasons Are Theatrical. Each One Enters Like A Prima Donna, Convinced Its Performance Is The Reason The World Has People In It.

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

Do They Still Call It Infatuation? That Magic Ax That Chops Away The World In One Blow, Leaving Only The Couple Standing There Trembling? Whatever They Call It, It Leaps Over Anything, Takes The Biggest Chair, The Largest Slice, Rules The Ground Wherever It Walks, From A Mansion To A Swamp, And Its Selfishness Is Its Beauty.... People With No Imagination Feed It With Sex -- The Clown Of Love. They Don't Know The Real Kinds, The Better Kinds, Where Losses Are Cut And Everybody Benefits. It Takes A Certain Intelligence To Love Like That -- Softly, Without Props.

You Free. Nothing And Nobody Is Obliged To Save You But You.

In My Mother's Church, Everybody Read The Bible And It Was Mostly About Music. My Mother Had The Most Beautiful Voice I Have Ever Heard In My Life. She Could Sing Anything - Classical, Jazz, Blues, Opera. And People Came From Long Distances To That Little Church She Went To - African Methodist Episcopal, The Ame Church She Belonged To - Just Hear Her.

A Dead Hydrangea Is As Intricate And Lovely As One In Bloom. Bleak Sky Is As Seductive As Sunshine, Miniature Orange Trees Without Blossom Or Fruit Are Not Defective; They Are That.

I Like Marriage. The Idea.

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

It Would Be Ten Years Before They Saw Each Other Again, And Their Meeting Would Be Thick With Birds.

There's A Contract That I Make Between Myself, The Author, And The Reader. I Have To Figure Out How To Give The Reader Certain Powers Of Recognition, Or His Own Knowledge, His Own Feelings, But I Provide Them, So We're Working Together.

Working Together

A Friend Gathers All The Pieces And Gives Them Back In The Right Order.

Much Handled Things Are Always Soft(27).

Certain Seeds It Will Not Nurture, Certain Fruit It Will Not Bear And When The Land Kills Of Its Own Volition, We Acquiesce And Say The Victim Had No Right To Live

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.

I Want To Feel What I Feel. What's Mine. Even If It's Not Happiness, Whatever That Means. Because You're All You've Got.

They Had Stared At Her With Great Uncomprehending Eyes. Eyes That Questioned Nothing And Asked Everything. Unblinking And Unabashed, They Stared Up At Her. The End Of The World Lay In Their Eyes, And The Beginning, And All The Waste In Bewteen.

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.

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

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

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

Every Now And Then She Looked Around For Tangible Evidence Of His Having Ever Been There. Where Were The Butterflies? The Blueberries? The Whistling Reed? She Could Find Nothing, For He Had Left Nothing But His Stunning Absence.

She Is Convinced That When Language Dies, Out Of Carelessness, Disuse, Indifference And Absence Of Esteem, Or Killed By Fiat, Not Only She Herself, But All Users And Makers Are Accountable For Its Demise. In Her Country Children Have Bitten Their Tongues Off And Use Bullets Instead To Iterate The Voice Of Speechlessness, Of Disabled And Disabling Language, Of Language Adults Have Abandoned Altogether As A Device For Grappling With Meaning, Providing Guidance, Or Expressing Love.

Everything I've Ever Done, In The Writing World, Has Been To Expand Articulation, Rather Than To Close It.

A Bestseller Is A Book That Non-book Buyers Buy

Did You Ever See The Way The Clouds Love A Mountain? They Circle All Around It; Sometimes You Can't Even See The Mountain For The Clouds. But You Know What? ... The Clouds Never Cover The Head. His Head Pokes Through, Because The Clouds Let Him; They Don't Wrap Him Up. They Let Him Keep His Head High, Free.

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

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.

Black People Have Always Been Used As A Buffer In This Country Between Powers To Prevent Class War.

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.

American Means White, And Africanist People Struggle To Make The Term Applicable To Themselves With Ethnicity And Hyphen After Hyphen After Hyphen.

Anger ... It's A Paralyzing Emotion ... You Can't Get Anything Done. People Sort Of Think It's An Interesting, Passionate, And Igniting Feeling — I Don't Think It's Any Of That — It's Helpless ... It's Absence Of Control — And I Need All Of My Skills, All Of The Control, All Of My Powers ... And Anger Doesn't Provide Any Of That — I Have No Use For It Whatsoever." [interview With Cbs Radio Host Don Swaim, September 15, 1987.]

The Past Is Interesting To Me Because It's Been Dumbed Down Or Flattened Out, Or Academically Nitpicked So You Can't Get Any Life Out Of It, You Just Get Data.

The Body Is Ready To Have Babies. Nature Wants It Done Then, When The Body Can Handle It, Not After 40, When The Income Can Handle It.

The Men Began To Trade Tales Of Atrocities, First Stories They Had Heard, Then Those They'd Witnessed, And Finally The Things That Had Happened To Themselves. A Litany Of Personal Humiliation, Outrage, And Anger Turned Sicklelike Back To Themselves As Humor. They Laughed Then, Uproariously, About The Speed With Which They Had Run, The Pose They Had Assumed, The Ruse They Had Invented To Escape Or Decrease Some Threat To Their Manliness, Their Humanness. All But Empire State, Who Stood, Broom In Hand And Drop-lipped, With The Expression Of A Very Intelligent Ten-year-old.

So This Is What Insanity Is. Not Goofy Behavior, But Watching A Sudden Change In The World You Used To Know.

There Is An Incredible Amount Of Magic And Feistiness In Black Men That Nobody Has Been Able To Wipe Out. But Everybody Has Tried.

Deep, Deep Trouble. Can't Rival The Dead For Love. Lose Every Time.

It's Been Mentioned Or Suggested That Paradise Will Not Be Well Studied, Because It's About This Unimportant Intellectual Topic, Which Is Religion.

Make Up A Story... For Our Sake And Yours Forget Your Name In The Street; Tell Us What The World Has Been To You In The Dark Places And In The Light. Don't Tell Us What To Believe, What To Fear. Show Us Belief's Wide Skirt And The Stitch That Unravels Fear's Caul.

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.

Something That Is Loved Is Never Lost.

When A Child Walks In The Room, Your Child Or Anybody Else’s Child, Do Your Eyes Light Up? That’s What They’re Looking For.

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

People Say To Write About What You Know. I'm Here To Tell You, No One Wants To Read That, Cos You Don't Know Anything. So Write About Something You Don't Know. And Don't Be Scared, Ever.

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

Life That Crawled, Life That Slunk And Crept And Never Closed Its Eyes. Life That Burrowed And Scurried, And Life So Still It Was Indistinguishable From The Ivy Stems On Which It Lay. Birth, Life, And Death - Each Took Place On The Hidden Side Of A Leaf.

Inspirational Life

Birth Life And Death

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

Sifting Daylight Dissolves The Memory, Turns It Into Dust Motes Floating In Light.

Some Native American Writers Enjoy Being Called Native American Writers.

Native American

He Leans Over And Takes Her Hand. With The Other He Touches Her Face. ‘you Your Best Thing, Sethe. You Are.’ His Holding Fingers Are Holding Hers. ‘me? Me?

I Think One Of The Reasons I'm So Thrilled With Writing Is Because It Is An Act Of Reading For Me At The Same Time, Which Is Why My Revisions Are So Sustained.

When You Know Your Name, You Should Hang On To It, For Unless It Is Noted Down And Remembered, It Will Die When You Do.

If Happiness Is Anticipation With Certainty, We Were Happy.

You Marvel At The Economy And This Choice Of Words. How Many Ways Can You Describe The Sky And The Moon? After Sylvia Plath, What Can You Say?

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

Make A Difference About Something Other Than Yourselves.

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.

You Looked At Me Then Like You Knew Me, And I Thought It Really Was Eden, And I Couldn't Take Your Eyes In Because I Was Loving The Hoof Marks On Your Cheeks.

Love At First Sight

Gimme Hate, Lord,” He Whimpered. “i’ll Take Hate Any Day. But Don’t Give Me Love. I Can’t Take No More Love, Lord. I Can’t Carry It...it’s Too Heavy. Jesus, You Know, You Know All About It. Ain’t It Heavy? Jesus? Ain’t Love Heavy?

Who's Got Game? The Ant Or The Grasshopper? The Lion Or The Mouse? Poppy Or The Snake?

Perhaps That's What All Human Relationships Boiled Down To: Would You Save My Life? Or Would You Take It?

Human Relations

Human Relationships

Evil Is Just Sort Of Ultimately Boring. The Good Thing Is Just Complicated. It's More Provocative To Me And More Stimulating To Me.

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.

No Gasp At A Miracle That Is Truly Miraculous Because The Magic Lies In The Fact That You Knew It Was There For You All Along.

A Man Ain't Nothing But A Man. But A Son? Well, Now, That's Somebody.

Pain. I Seem To Have An Affection, A Kind Of Sweettooth For It. Bolts Of Lightning, Little Rivulets Of Thunder. And I The Eye Of The Storm.

If You Can Only Be Tall Because Someone Else Is On Their Knees, Then You Have A Serious Problem. And White People Have A Very, Very Serious Problem.

It Was A Fine Cry - Loud And Long - But It Had No Bottom And It Had No Top, Just Circles And Circles Of Sorrow.

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

Definitions Belong To The Definers, Not The Defined.

Being Able To Laugh Got Me Through.

From My Point Of View, Which Is That Of A Storyteller, I See Your Life As Something Artful, Waiting, Just Waiting And Ready For You To Make It Art.

How Come It Can’t Fly No Better Than A Chicken?’ Milkman Asked. Too Much Tail. All That Jewelry Weighs It Down. Like Vanity. Can’t Nobody Fly With All That [stuff]. Wanna Fly, You Got To Give Up The [stuff] That Weighs You Down.’ The Peacock Jumped Onto The Hood Of The Buick And Once More Spread Its Tail, Sending The Flashy Buick Into Oblivion.

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

It Was Not Death Or Dying That Frightened Him, But The Unexpectedness Of Both. In Sorting It All Out, He Hit On The Notion That If One Day A Year Were Devoted To It, Everybody Could Get It Out Of The Way And The Rest Of The Year Would Be Safe And Free. In This Manner He Instituted National Suicide Day.

I Don't Want You To Write About What You Know, Because You Don't Know Anything. I Don't Want To Hear About Your Boyfriend Or Your Grandma... I'm Getting A Little Tired Of 'my Life Story As Fiction'. Please Don't Tell Me About Your Little Life - Is There Nothing Larger? More Important?

Black Boys Became Criminalized. I Was In Constant Dread For Their Lives, Because They Were Targets Everywhere. They Still Are.

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.

Love Is Divine Only And Difficult Always.

Love Is Or It Ain't. Thin Love Ain't Love At All.

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

The Best Part Of All, The Absolutely Most Delicious Part, Is Finishing It And Then Doing It Over I Rewrite A Lot, Over And Over Again, So That It Looks Like I Never Did.

The Race Thing Is Sort Of A Misnomer. It's Just The Human Race, Right? That's It. The Rest Of It, And Racism, Is Socially Constructed. Nobody Is Born Racist, No One. What Happens Is Other Things That Are Usually Based On Power, Money, Feeling Good About Yourself, Or Bad About Yourself, Those Things Play Into Hating Other People For Whatever Reason.

I Type In One Place, But I Write All Over The House.

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.

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.

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.

Tell Us What It Is To Be A Woman So That We May Know What It Is To Be A Man. What Moves At The Margin. What It Is To Have No Home In This Place. To Be Set Adrift From The One You Knew. What It Is To Live At The Edge Of Towns That Cannot Bear Your Company.

A Son Ain't What A Woman Say. A Son Is What A Man Do.

Girl, I Got My Mind. And What Goes On In It. Which Is To Say, I Got Me...my Lonely Is Mine.

Literature, It Seems To Me, Is Wisdom.

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.

I Know There's Some Poetry That Sort Of Sounds Like Daisies, But Most Of The Good Poetry Is Also [political], You Can Feel The Heartbeat; It's About Some Situation That Concerns Human Beings Under Duress. It's Suggesting A Solution, Or Just Acknowledging That [the Situation] Exists. Art Does That.

...fact Was She Knew More About Them Than She Knew About Herself, Having Never Had The Map To Discover What She Was Like. Could She Sing? (was It Nice To Hear When She Did?) Was She Pretty? Was She A Good Friend? Could She Have Been A Loving Mother? A Faithful Wife? Have I Got A Sister And Does She Favor Me? If My Mother Knew Me Would She Like Me? (140)

My Metaphor Is That Evil Always Has A Top Hat And A Cape, And Goodness Is Over There In The Corner. For Me It's Just Too Easy, If You Hate Your Country Or Your Wife, So You Kill Them. You Can't Think Through That, You Can't Feel Through That, You Can't Do The Work. And Now We Have Guns. Solution? I Don't Think So.

I Wish I’d A Knowed More People. I Would Of Loved ‘em All. If I’d A Knowed More, I Would A Loved More

All Art Is Knowing When To Stop.

I Tell My Students There Is Such A Thing As 'writer's Block,' And They Should Respect It. You Shouldn't Write Through It. It's Blocked Because It Ought To Be Blocked, Because You Haven't Got It Right Now.

My Daddy's Face Is A Study. Winter Moves Into It And Presides There. His Eyes Become A Cliff Of Snow Threatening To Avalanche, His Eyebrows Bend Like Black Limbs Of Leafless Trees. His Skin Takes On The Pale Cheerless Yellow Of Winter Sun; For A Jaw He Has The Edges Of A Snowbound Field Dotted With Stubble; His High Forehead Is The Frozen Sweep Of The Erie.

The Theme You Choose May Change Or Simply Elude You, But Being Your Own Story Means You Can Always Choose The Tone. It Also Means That You Can Invent The Language To Say Who Are You And What You Mean.

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

The Administration Of The United States Is Such Dread I Almost Feel Paralyzed.

I Know The World Is Bruised And Bleeding, And Though It Is Important Not To Ignore Its Pain, It Is Also Critical To Refuse To Succumb To Its Malevolence. Like Failure, Chaos Contains Information That Can Lead To Knowledge - Even Wisdom. Like Art.

I Have A Lot Of Respect For Readers Because I'm A Reader. That's How I Got Into Writing.

Writing Is Really A Way Of Thinking--not Just Feeling But Thinking About Things That Are Disparate, Unresolved, Mysterious, Problematic Or Just Sweet.

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.

I Am A Moralist. I Worry.

But Maybe A Man Was Nothing But A Man, Which Is What Baby Suggs Always Said. They Encouraged You To Put Some Of Your Weight In Their Hands And Soon As You Felt How Light And Lovely That Was, They Studied Your Scars And Tribulations, After Which They Did What He Had Done: Ran Her Children Out And Tore Up The House. [...] A Man Ain't Nothing But A Man,' Said Baby Suggs. 'but A Son? Well Now, That's Somebody.

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.

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.

Black People's Music Is In A Class By Itself And Always Has Been. There's Nothing Like It. The Reason For That Is Because It Was Not Tampered With By White People. It Was Not On The Media. It Was Not Anywhere Except Where Black People Were. And It Is One Of The Art Forms In Which Black People Decided What Is Good In It. Nobody Told Them. What Surfaced And What Floated To The Top, Were The Giants And The Best.

Isolation, You Know, Carries The Seeds Of Its Own Destruction Because As Times Change, Other Things Seep In.

There, In The Center Of That Silence Was Not Eternity But The Death Of Time And A Loneliness So Profound The Word Itself Had No Meaning. For Loneliness Assumed The Absence Of Other People, And The Solitude She Found In That Desperate Terrain Had Never Admitted The Possibility Of Other People. She Wept Then. Tears For The Deaths Of The Littlest Things: The Castaway Shoes Of Children; Broken Stems Of Marsh Grass Battered And Drowned By The Sea; Prom Photographs Of Dead Women She Never Knew; Wedding Rings In Pawnshop Windows; The Tiny Bodies Of Cornish Hens In A Nest Of Rice.

I Had Only One Desire: To Dismember It. To See Of What It Was Made, To Discover The Dearness, To Find The Beauty, The Desirability That Had Escaped Me, But Apparently Only Me.

My Father Saw Two Black Men Lynched On His Street In Cartersville, As A Child. And I Think Seeing Two Black Businessmen - Not Vagrants - Hanging From Trees As A Child Was Traumatic For Him.

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

He Wants To Put His Story Next To Hers.

It's Always Seemed To Me That Black People's Grace Has Been With What They Do With Language. In Lorrain, Ohio, When I Was A Child, I Went To School With And Heard The Stories Of Mexicans, Italians, And Greeks, And I Listened. I Remember Their Language, And A Lot Of It Is Marvelous. But When I Think Of Things My Mother Or Father Or Aunts Used To Say, It Seems The Most Absolutely Striking Thing In The World.

It Is Sheer Good Fortune To Miss Somebody Long Before They Leave You.

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.

Falling In Love

Like Friendship, Hatred Needed More Than Physical Intimacy; It Wanted Creativity And Hard Work To Sustain Itself

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 Are Your Best Thing

We're All Surrounded By What I Call Faux Language, Fake Language Of Commerce, Of News Media.

Of Course I'm A Black Writer... I'm Not Just A Black Writer, But Categories Like Black Writer, Woman Writer And Latin American Writer Aren't Marginal Anymore. We Have To Acknowledge That The Thing We Call "literature" Is More Pluralistic Now, Just As Society Ought To Be. The Melting Pot Never Worked. We Ought To Be Able To Accept On Equal Terms Everybody From The Hasidim To Walter Lippmann, From The Rastafarians To Ralph Bunche.

The Function Of Freedom Is To Free Someone Else.

I'm Just Trying To Look At Something Without Blinking, To See What It Is Like, Or It Could Have Been Like, And How That Had Something To Do With The Way We Live Now. Novels Are Always Inquiries For Me.

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

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

Love Is Never Any Better Than The Lover.

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.

They Seemed To Have Taken All Of Their Smoothly Cultivated Ignorance, Their Exquisitely Learned Self-hatred, Their Elaborately Designed Hopelessness And Sucked It All Up Into A Fiery Cone Of Scorn That Had Burned For Ages In The Hollows Of Their Minds― Cooled ―and Spilled Over Lips Of Outrage, Consuming Whatever Was In Its Path.

One Has To Work Very Carefully With What Is In Between The Words. What Is Not Said. Which Is Measure, Which Is Rhythm And So On. So, It Is What You Don't Write That Frequently Gives What You Do Write Its Power.

New York Is The Last True City.

When Am I Happy And When Am I Sad And What Is The Difference? What Do I Need To Know To Stay Alive? What Is True In The World?

The Seeds Of Destruction Lie In The Definition Of "chosen-ness" And Can Easily Blossom Into Bigotry. It's Not Inevitable But It Needs Constant Care To Avoid.

When A Man Angers You, He Conquers You.

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

There's A Difference Between Writing For A Living And Writing For Life. If You Write For A Living, You Make Enormous Compromises.... If You Write For Life, You'll Work Hard; You'll Do What's Honest, Not What Pays

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.

Our Ancestors Are An Ever Widening Circle Of Hope.

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