Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know.
Isolation, you know, carries the seeds of its own destruction because as times change, other things seep in.
A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double.
It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.
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.
Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.' Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.
Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s; it's choosing the ones you want.
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 couldn't bear to have people mispronounce my name. But the person I was was this person who was called Chloe.
you got two feet, Sethe, not four." he said, and right then a forest sprang up between them; tactless and quiet.
The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.
Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself
Like Guitar in Son of Solomon, and Son in Tar Baby, he believed that harmony could never exist between the races.
[Obama is ] creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom . . . [He is] the man for this time.
Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.
Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.
There is really nothing more to say - except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
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.
How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.
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.
To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom.
You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up.
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.
I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.
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.
And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.
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.
I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.
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 was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman*
Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.
Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.
I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are
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?
There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.
If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.
Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
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?
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.
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.
No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.
The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.
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.
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 language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time.
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.
There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.
The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.
I wanted to separate color from race. Distinguishing color - light, black, in-between - as the marker for race is really an error.