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

-Toni Morrison

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I'm Not Entangled In

Toni Morrison

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

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

Language Alone Protects Us From The Scariness Of Things With No Names. Language Alone Is Meditation.

Don’t Beg Anybody For Anything, Especially Love.

I Always Know The Ending; That's Where I Start.

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?

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.

Art Invites Us To Know Beauty And To Solicit It, Summon It, From Even The Most Tragic Of Circumstances.

Bearing Witness

A Dream Is Just A Nightmare With Lipstick.

Misery Colored By The Greens And Blues In My Mother's Voice Took Away All The Grief Out Of The Words And Left Me With A Conviction That Pain Was Not Only Endurable, It Was Sweet.

I Dream A Dream That Dreams Back At Me.

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

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.

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

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.

I Tell My Students One Of The Most Important Things They Need To Know Is When They Are At Their Best, Creatively. They Need To Ask Themselves, What Does The Ideal Room Look Like? Is There Music? Is There Silence? Is There Chaos Outside Or Is There Serenity Outside? What Do I Need In Order To Release My Imagination?

Love Is Never Any Better Than The Lover. Wicked People Love Wickedly, Violent People Love Violently, Weak People Love Weakly, Stupid People Love Stupidly, But The Love A Free Man Is Never Safe. There Is No Gift For The Beloved. The Lover Alone Possesses His Gift Of Love. The Loved One Is Shorn, Neutralized, Frozen In The Glance Of The Lover’s Inward Eyes.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Where Do You Get The Right To Decide Our Lives? I'll Tell You Where. From That Little Hog's Gut That Hangs Between Your Legs. Well, Let Me Tell You Something... You Will Need More Than That. I Don't Know Where You Will Get It Or Who Will Give It To You, But Mark My Words, You Will Need More Than That.... You Are A Sad, Pitiful, Stupid, Selfish, Hateful Man. I Hope Your Little Hog's Gut Stands You In Good Stead, And You Take Good Care Of It, Because You Don't Have Anything Else.

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.

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

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.

In A Way, Her Strangeness, Her Naiveté, Her Craving For The Other Half Of Her Equation Was The Consequence Of An Idle Imagination. Had She Paints, Or Clay, Or Knew The Discipline Of The Dance, Or Strings, Had She Anything To Engage Her Tremendous Curiosity And Her Gift For Metaphor, She Might Have Exchanged The Restlessness And Preoccupation With Whim For An Activity That Provided Her With All She Yearned For. And Like An Artist With No Art Form, She Became Dangerous.

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.

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

You Have To Be Willing To Think The Unthinkable.

Maybe [i Care About Language] Because I'm An Editor, Maybe Because I'm Picky, But It's All We Got, Don't Shrink It. Don't Dumb It Out, Make It Little.

The Writing Is - I'm Free Of Pain. It's The Place Where I Live; It's Where I Have Control; It's Where Nobody Tells Me What To Do; It's Where My Imagination Is Fecund And I Am Really At My Best. Nothing Matters More In The World Or In My Body Or Anywhere When I'm Writing.

My World Did Not Shrink Because I Was A Black Female Writer. It Just Got Bigger.

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.

My First-born. All I Can Remember Of Her Is How She Loved The Burned Bottom Of Bread. Can You Beat That? Eight Children And That's All I Remember.

I Began To Realize That This Idea Of The Lighter The Better And The Darker The Worse Was Really - Had An Impact On Sororities, On Friendships, On All Sorts Of Things, And It Was Stunning To Me.

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.

Make A Difference About Something Other Than Yourselves.

If We Had No Language We'd Have Nothing.

Love Is Divine Only And Difficult Always.

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

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.

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 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.

The Function Of Freedom Is To Free Someone Else.

Misery Don't Call Ahead. That's Why You Have To Stay Awake - Otherwise It Just Walks On In Your Door.

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

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.

Think Of Anybody - Dostoevsky Or Jane Austen - [their Work] Was Always Something That Now We Would Call Political. So I Don't See Those Separations Too Much, Between What Is Artistic And What Is Political. Maybe In Painting... No, I Don't Even Believe That.

The Difference Between That Which Is Humane And That Which Is Patriotic Is A Vital Difference.

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.

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

Waiting For You

Don't Tell Us What To Believe, What To Fear. Show Us Belief's Wide Skirt And The Stitch That Unravels Fear's Caul.

Beloved, You Are My Sister, You Are My Daughter, You Are My Face; You Are Me.

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

I Always Start Out With An Idea, Even A Boring Idea, That Becomes A Question I Don't Have Answers To.

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

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

When I Write, I Don't Translate For White Readers.... Dostoevski Wrote For A Russian Audience, But We're Able To Read Him. If I'm Specific, And I Don't Overexplain, Then Anyone Can Overhear Me.

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.

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.

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

All Of Us--all Who Knew Her--felt So Wholesome After We Cleaned Ourselves On Her. We Were So Beautiful When We Stood Astride Her Ugliness. Her Simplicity Decorated Us, Her Guilt Sanctified Us, Her Pain Made Us Glow With Health, Her Awkwardness Made Us Think We Had A Sense Of Humor. Her Inarticulateness Made Us Believe We Were Eloquent. Her Poverty Kept Us Generous. Even Her Waking Dreams We Used--to Silence Our Own Nightmares.

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

We Read About How Ajax And Achilles Will Die For Each Other, But Very Little About The Friendship Of Women.

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.

A Little Black Girl Yearns For The Blue Eyes Of A Little White Girl, And The Horror At The Heart Of Her Yearning Is Exceeded Only By The Evil Of Fulfillment

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.

I Thought The Whole World Was Like Lorain.

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.

This Is Really Skin Privilege, The Ranking Of Color In Terms Of Its Closeness To White People Or White-skinned People And Its Devaluation According To How Dark One Is And The Impact That Has On People Who Are Dedicated To The Privileges Of Certain Levels Of Skin Color.

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.]

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

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

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

I Am A Moralist. I Worry.

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.

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

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.

My Children Are Delightful People, Whom I Would Love Even If They Weren't My Children.

And Wouldn't You Know He'd Be A Singing Man.

If They Put An Iron Circle Around Your Neck I Will Bite It Away

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 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.

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

They Held Hands And Knew That Only The Coffin Would Lie In The Earth; The Bubbly Laughter And The Press Of Fingers In The Palm Would Stay Aboveground Forever. At First, As They Stood There, Their Hands Were Clenched Together. They Relaxed Slowly Until During The Walk Back Home Their Fingers Were Laced In As Gentle A Clasp As That Of Any Two Young Girlfriends Trotting Up The Road On A Summer Day Wondering What Happened To Butterflies In The Winter.

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 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.

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.

I Would Solve A Lot Of Literary Problems Just Thinking About A Character In The Subway, Where You Can't Do Anything Anyway.

Word-work Is Sublime... Because It Is Generative; It Makes Meaning That Secures Our Difference, Our Human Difference-the Way In Which We Are Like No Other Life. We Die. That May Be The Meaning Of Life. But We Do Language. That May Be The Measure Of Our Lives.

Meaning Of Life

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.

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.

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.

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

Like Guitar In Son Of Solomon, And Son In Tar Baby, He Believed That Harmony Could Never Exist Between The Races.

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.

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.

You Are Your Own Stories And Therefore Free To Imagine And Experience What It Means To Be Human... And Although You Don't Have Complete Control Over The Narrative - No Author Does, I Can Tell You - You Could Nevertheless Create It.

Occasionally, As Children, We Might Figure Out How To Call Somebody A Name, And They Would Figure Out How To Call Us. But It Wasn't - It Was So Light. It Was So Fluffy. I Didn't Really Have A Strong Awareness Of Segregation And The Separation Of Races Until I Left Lorain, Ohio.

Sometimes Joyce Is Hilarious. I Read Finnegans Wake After Graduate School And I Had The Great Good Fortune Of Reading It Without Any Help. I Don't Know If I Read It Right, But It Was Hilarious! I Laughed Constantly! I Didn't Know What Was Going On For Whole Blocks But It Didn't Matter Because I Wasn't Going To Be Graded On It. I Think The Reason Why Everyone Still Has So Much Fun With Shakespeare Is Because He Didn't Have Any Literary Critic. He Was Just Doing It; And There Were No Reviews Except For People Throwing Stuff On Stage. He Could Just Do It.

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

An Innocent Man Is A Sin Before God. Inhuman And Therefore Untrustworthy. No Man Should Live Without Absorbing The Sins Of His Kind, The Foul Air Of His Innocence, Even If It Did Wilt Rows Of Angel Trumpets And Cause Them To Fall From Their Vines.

Sex Is Difficult To Write About Because It's Just Not Sexy Enough. The Only Way To Write About It Is Not To Write Much. Let The Reader Bring His Own Sexuality Into The Text. A Writer I Usually Admire Has Written About Sex In The Most Off-putting Way. There Is Just Too Much Information.

Too Much Information

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

Say Make Me, Remake Me. You Are Free To Do It And I Am Free To Let You Because Look, Look. Look Where Your Hands Are. Now.

If You Want To Fly, You Have To Give Up The Things That Weigh You Down.

Getting Things Done

Only Her Tight, Tight Eyes Were Left. They Were Always Left...they Were Everything. Everything Was There, In Them...thrown, In This Way, Into The Binding Conviction That Only A Miracle Could Relieve Her, She Would Never Know Her Beauty. She Would See Only What There Was To See: The Eyes Of Other People.

I Like Marriage. The Idea.

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 There Is Pain, There Are No Words. All Pain Is The Same.

He Said, 'always. Always.

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.

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

Much Handled Things Are Always Soft(27).

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

I Can't Explain Inspiration. A Writer Is Either Compelled To Write Or Not. And If I Waited For Inspiration I Wouldn't Really Be A Writer.

What's Interesting About Writing Is The Invention, The Creative Thing. Writing About Myself Is A Yawn.

...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.

All The Time, I'm Afraid The Thing That Happened That Made It All Right For My Mother To Kill My Sister Could Happen Again. I Don't Know What It Is, I Don't Know Who It Is, But Maybe There Is Something Else Terrible Enough To Make Her Do It Again. I Need To Know What That Thing Might Be, But I Don't Want To. Whatever It Is, It Comes From Outside This House, Outside The Yard, And It Can Come Right On In The Yard If It Wants To. So I Never Leave This House And I Watch Over The Yard, So It Can't Happen Again And My Mother Won't Have To Kill Me Too.

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.

Me And You, We Got More Yesterday Than Anybody. We Need Some Kind Of Tomorrow.

...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.

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 Need A Whole Community To Raise A Child. I Have Raised Two Children, Alone.

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.

Shallow Believers Prefer A Shallow God.

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.

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?

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

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.

Definitions Belong To The Definers, Not The Defined.

Political Doesn't Necessarily Mean You Have An Agenda.

All Water Has A Perfect Memory And Is Forever Trying To Get Back To Where It Was.

Lay My Head On The Railroad Line. Train Come Along; Pacify My Mind.

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

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

Something That Is Loved Is Never Lost.

If There's A Book You Really Want To Read, But It Hasn't Been Written Yet, Then You Must Write It.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Somebody Has To Take Responsibility For Being A Leader.

Taking Responsibility

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.

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

When I Went Into The Publishing Industry, Many Women Talked About The Difficulty They Had In Persuading Their Families To Let Them Go To College. They Educated The Boys, And The Girls Had To Struggle.

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.

Language Can Never 'pin Down' Slavery, Genocide, War. Nor Should It Yearn For The Arrogance To Be Able To Do So. Its Force, Its Felicity, Is In Its Reach Toward The Ineffable.

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

Human Relations

Human Relationships

Today Is Always Here,' Said Sethe. 'tomorrow, Never.

Lonely Was Much Better Than Alone.

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.

It's Bliss When You Give Up All That Stuff That Separates You From Other Human Beings. It's Hard, But You Break Down All That Stuff.

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

It Was My Father Who Could Do No Wrong. So I Didn't Think Of It As, Oh, Look, My Father's A Violent Man.

Nothing Could Be Taken For Granted. Women Who Loved You Tried To Cut Your Throat, While Women Who Didn't Even Know Your Name Scrubbed Your Back. Witches Could Sound Like Katharine Hepburn And Your Best Friend Could Try To Strangle You. Smack In The Middle Of An Orchid There Might Be A Blob Of Jello And Inside A Mickey Mouse Doll, A Fixed And Radiant Star.

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?

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.

Lonely, Ain't It? Yes, But My Lonely Is Mine. Now Your Lonely Is Somebody Else's. Made By Somebody Else And Handed To You. Ain't That Something? A Secondhand Lonely.

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.

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

There Is A Loneliness That Can Be Rocked. Arms Crossed, Knees Drawn Up, Holding, Holding On, This Motion, Unlike A Ship's, Smooths And Contains The Rocker. It's An Inside Kind--wrapped Tight Like Skin. Then There Is The Loneliness That Roams. No Rocking Can Hold It Down. It Is Alive. On Its Own. A Dry And Spreading Thing That Makes The Sound Of One's Own Feet Going Seem To Come From A Far-off Place.

Sexist Language, Racist Language, Theistic Language - All Are Typical Of The Policing Languages Of Mastery, And Cannot, Do Not, Permit New Knowledge Or Encourage The Mutual Exchange Of Ideas.

In Times Of Dread, Artists Must Never Choose To Remain Silent.

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

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

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

I Guess I'm Depressed. I Don't Know. I Can't Explain It. Part Of It Is The Irritability Of Being 84, And Part Of It Is Being Not As Physically Strong As I Once Was. And Part Of It Is My Misunderstanding, I Think, Of What's Going On In The World.

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.

A Coward With A Gun Is The Most Dangerous Person In The World

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.

I Feel Like Today We Always Glorify The Young, Just-plucked-from-college Writer. But It's Much Harder To Start Writing Later, In Middle Age, Struggling On A Book Around A Full-time Job And Family.

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

...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.

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.

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

Anything Dead Coming Back To Life Hurts.

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

When A Man Angers You, He Conquers You.

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 Laughed But Before I Could Agree With The Hairdressers That She Was Crazy, She Said, 'what's The World For If You Can't Make It Up The Way You Want It?' " 'the Way I Want It?' " 'yeah. The Way You Want It. Don't You Want It To Be Something More Than What It Is?' " 'what'st Eh Point? I Can't Change It.' " 'that's The Point. If You Don't, It Will Change You And It'll Be Your Fault Cause You Let It. I Let It. And Messed Up My Life.' " 'mess It Up How?' " 'forgot It.' " 'forgot?' " 'forgot It Was Mine. My Life. I Just Ran Up And Down The Streets Wishing I Was Somebody Else.

The Idea Of A Wanton Woman Is Something I Have Inserted Into Almost All Of My Books. An Outlaw Figure Who Is Disallowed In The Community Because Of Her Imagination Or Activity Or Status - That Kind Of Anarchic Figure Has Always Fascinated Me. And The Benefits They Bring With Them, In Spite Of The Fact That They Are Either Dismissed Or Upbraided - Something About Their Presence Is Constructive In The Long Run.

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

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Gil Scott-Heron

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