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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.

-Toni Morrison

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Toni Morrison

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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.

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He Said, 'always. Always.

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

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.

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

A Bestseller Is A Book That Non-book Buyers Buy

Each Member Of The Family In His Own Cell Of Consciousness, Each Making His Own Patchwork Quilt Of Reality - Collecting Fragments Of Experience Here, Pieces Of Information There. From The Tiny Impressions Gleaned From One Another, They Created A Sense Of Belonging And Tried To Make Do With The Way They Found Each Other.

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.]

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.

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.

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

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

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

I Didn't Fall In Love, I Rose In It.

Falling In Love

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.

Make A Difference About Something Other Than Yourselves.

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.

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

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

My Theory Is That The World Is A Difficult Place To Live In And Distraction Is The Name Of The Game.

Definitions Belong To The Definers, Not The Defined.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The Isolation, The Separateness, Is Always A Part Of Any Utopia.

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.

Much Handled Things Are Always Soft(27).

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

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 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.

Love Is Never Any Better Than The Lover.

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

All She Saw, Down In The Cellar Well Beneath The Stoop, Was A Light Yellow Feather With A Tip Of Green. And She Had Never Named Him. Had Called Him "my Parrot" All These Years. "my Parrot." "love You. "love You." Did The Dogs Get Him? Or Did He Get The Message - That She Said, "my Parrot" And He Said, "love You," And She Had Never Said It Back Or Even Taken The Trouble To Name Him - And Manage Somehow To Fly Away On Wings That Had Not Soared For Six Years.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Passion Is Never Enough; Neither Is Skill.

It Seems To Me Everything Shakespeare Did Was Political.

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.

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.

Racism Will Disappear When It's No Longer Profitable, And No Longer Psychologically Useful. And When That Happens, It'll Be Gone. But At The Moment, People Make A Lot Of Money Off Of It, Pro And Con.

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.

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.

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

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.

There Is No Civilization That Did Not Begin With Art, Whether It Was Drawing A Line In The Sand, Painting A Cave Or Dancing.

Our Ancestors Are An Ever Widening Circle Of Hope.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I'm A Writer In The World. I Translate The Confusion That I Might Feel, The Dread That I Know I Feel, Moving Towards Some Other Place, Moving Away From Puny Language, From All That Dread Into Some Other Kind Of Language.

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

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

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

New York Is The Last True 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 ."

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

My Home Is Such A Powerfully Imaginative Place That The Space Is Almost Irrelevant. I Think The House I Live At On The Hudson Is Where I Belong Because It's The Only Place Where I Am That I Never Think About When I'm Leaving.

It Was Becoming A Habit-this Concentration On Things Behind Him. Almost As Though There Were No Future To Be Had. *milkman*

I Am A Moralist. I Worry.

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

I Sang "o Holy Night" In A School Choir. My Mother Came And Listened To Me And Complimented Me. So That Was The High Point. I Cannot Sing A Note.

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

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?

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 Really Want Some Meaning. It Used To Be Easy To Toss It Off. Now It's Harder And Harder. You Have To Navigate Just To Find Something That Has Nourishment. It's The Absence Of Nourishment. What Do You Do In Place Of Nourishment? It's Usually Junk. Either It's Junk Food Or Junk Clothes Or Junk Ideas.

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 Have The Wonderful Pleasure Of Finishing The Book And Closing It. And I Don't Read Them Later.

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.

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.

...when The Little Boy Discovered, At Four, The Same Thing Mr. Smith Had Learned Earlier -- That Only Birds And Planes Could Fly -- He Lost All Interest In Himself.

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

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

We Never Shape The World . . . The World Shapes Us.

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

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.

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

When I'm Not Creating Or Focusing On Something I Can Imagine Or Invent, I Think I Go Back Over My Life - I Don't Recommend This By The Way - And You Pick Up, Oh, What'd You Do That For? Why Didn't You Understand This?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Falling In Love

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

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

Would It Be All Right? Would It Be All Right To Go Ahead And Feel? Go Ahead And Count On Something?

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.

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

Listen Up. Let Me Tell You Something. A Man Ain’t A Goddamn Ax. Chopping, Hacking, Busting Every Goddamn Minute Of The Day. Things Get To Him. Things He Can’t Chop Down Because They’re Inside.

I Thought The Whole World Was Like Lorain.

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

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.

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

...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)

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.

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

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.

Black Women Are The Touchstone By Which All That Is Human Can Be Measured.

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

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

Don’t Beg Anybody For Anything, Especially Love.

I Know That My Books Are Worthy, Which Is Separate From Me.

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.

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

Let Your Face Speak What's In Your Heart.

Lonely Was Much Better Than Alone.

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.

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

Being Good To Somebody Is Just Like Being Mean To Somebody. Risky. You Don't Get Nothing For It.

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.

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!

For A Long Time I Was Convinced That The Conflict Between Jewish People And Black People In This Country Was A Media Event.

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.

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.

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

Some Native American Writers Enjoy Being Called Native American Writers.

Native American

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

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

I Don't Believe Any Real Artists Have Ever Been Non-political. They May Have Been Insensitive To This Particular Plight Or Insensitive To That, But They Were Political, Because That's What An Artist Is-a Politician.

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.

A Dream Is Just A Nightmare With Lipstick.

She Had Been Looking All Along For A Friend, And It Took Her A While To Discover That A Lover Was Not A Comrade And Could Never Be - For A Woman. And That No One Would Ever Be That Version Of Herself Which She Sought To Reach Out To And Touch With An Ungloved Hand. There Was Only Her Own Mood And Whim, And If That Was All There Was, She Decided To Turn The Naked Hand Toward It, Discover It And Let Others Become As Intimate With Their Own Selves As She Was.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Love It, Love It And The Beat And Beating Heart, Love That Too. More Than Eyes Or Feet. More Than Lungs That Have Yet To Draw Free Air. More Than Your Life-holding Womb And Your Life-giving Private Parts, Hear Me Now, Love Your Heart. For This Is The Prize.

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

I Have Only To Break Into The Tightness Of A Strawberry, And I See Summer - Its Dust And Lowering Skies.

For Me, Art Is The Restoration Of Order. It May Discuss All Sort Of Terrible Things, But There Must Be Satisfaction At The End. A Little Bit Of Hunger, But Also Satisfaction.

Somebody Has To Take Responsibility For Being A Leader.

Taking Responsibility

He Wants To Put His Story Next To Hers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Human Relations

Human Relationships

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

If We Had No Language We'd Have Nothing.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 Dream A Dream That Dreams Back At Me.

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.

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.

There Is A Certain Kind Of Peace That Is Not Merely The Absence Of War. It Is Larger Than That. The Peace I Am Thinking Of Is Not At The Mercy Of History's Rule, Nor Is It A Passive Surrender To The Status Quo. The Peace I Am Thinking Of Is The Dance Of An Open Mind When It Engages Another Equally Open One -- An Activity That Occurs Most Naturally, Most Often In The Reading/writing World We Live In. Accessible As It Is, This Particular Kind Of Peace Warrants Vigilance.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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

Which Was What Love Was: Unmotivated Respect.

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.

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

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