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.
Which was what love was: unmotivated respect.
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.
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.
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.
Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses -- young loving.
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.
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.
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.
The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love.
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.
Just Imagine. No illness. Ever. No pain. No aging or frailty of any kind. No loss or grief or tears. And obviously no more dying, not even if the stars shattered into motes and the moon disintegrated like a corpse beneath the sea.
We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.
They were, in fact and at last, free. And the lives of these old black women were synthesized in their eyes -- a puree of tragedy and humor, wickedness and serenity, truth and fantasy.
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 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.
Lay my head on the railroad line. Train come along; pacify my mind.
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 debates, for the most part, are examples unworthy of a playground: name-calling, verbal slaps, gossip, giggles, all while the swings and slides of governance remain empty.
Make no mistake, the privatization of prisons is less about unburdening taxpayers than it is about providing bankrupt communities with sources of income and especially about providing corporations with a captured population available for unpaid labor.
The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.
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.
Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharrassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world's resources.
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.
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.
Longer Version:
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. An absence so decorative, so ornate, it was difficult for her to understand how she had ever endured, without falling dead or being consumed, his magnificent presence.
Here Stands A Man.
Wishful thinking, perhaps, but he could have sworn the sweet bay was pleased to agree. Its olive-green leaves went wild in the glow of a fat cherry-red sun.
I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer -- its dust and lowering skies.
She had not lived by the sea all those years, listened to the wharfman's songs all that time, to spend her life in the soundless cave of Elihue's mind.
I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
I dream a dream that dreams back at me.
I always know the ending; that's where I start.
Let your face speak what's in your heart.
Longer Version:
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.
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.
Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown. In my heart it don't mean a thing.
Something that is loved is never lost.
Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
All important things are hard.
Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
You are your best thing.
Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
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.
He fell for an eighteen-year old girl with one of those deepdown spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going.
Black women were armed, black women were dangerous and the less money they had the deadlier the weapon they chose.
A blessing she was reckless enough to take for granted, lean on, as though Sweet Home was one... A bigger fool never lived.
Rainwater held on to pine needles for dear life and Beloved could not take her eyes off Sethe.
You know, the kind who know Jesus by His first name, but out of politeness never use it even to His face.
Carefully they replaced the soil and covered the entire grave with uprooted grass.
Neither one had spoken a word.
So you protected yourself and loved small.
Violet learned then what she had forgotten until this moment: that laughter is serious. More complicated, more serious than tears.
It's gonna hurt, now, said Amy. anything dead coming back to life hurts.
Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.
They laughed too, even Rose Dear shook her head and smiled, and suddenly the world was right side up. Violet learned then what she had forgotten until this moment: that laughter is serious. More complicated, more serious than tears.
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.
Somewhere between retina and object, between vision and view, his eyes draw back, hesitate, and hover. At some fixed point in time and space he senses that he need not waste the effort of a glance. He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see.
What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something.
Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.
Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty....A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. His outrage grew and felt like power. For the first time he honestly wished he could work miracles.
I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, for the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.
They were not holding hands, but their shadows were.
There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.
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.
Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed, she said, and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.
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.
American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.
Misery don't call ahead. That's why you have to stay awake -- otherwise it just walks on in your door.
Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.
Laughter is more serious than tears.
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.
The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.
All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.
Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
Her passions were narrow but deep.
At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough.
Don't beg anybody for anything, especially love.
Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all day by themselves with no help from the mind.
She is not so afraid at night because she is the color of it.
What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?
If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
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.
Writing is really a way of thinking -- not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.
You wanna fly, you got to give up the sh*t that weighs you down.
It was a fine cry -- loud and long -- but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.