Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.
Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.
Evil is just sort of ultimately boring. The good thing is just complicated. It's more provocative to me and more stimulating to me.
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.
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.
Movements toward freedom and the self-respect that comes from something other than what people think is their most important feature.
When you stiffen, you know that whatever you stiffen about is very important. The stuff is important, the fear itself is information.
Anything I have ever learned of any consequence, I have learned from Black people. I have never been bored by any Black person, ever.
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.
I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it.
In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.
I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.
In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.
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.
She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.
The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people.
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.
When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.' 'I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.
Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm.
If you'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.
Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
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?
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.
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.
American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.
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.
If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.
Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharrassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world's resources.
Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time.
Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there.
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.
Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.
They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations.
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.
But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day.
I don't work. I keep telling people I'm unemployed. And I don't wash dishes, and I don't wash clothes, and I don't clean my house. Somebody else does that.
He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. ‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers. ‘Me? Me?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Beginning 'Beloved' with numerals rather than spelled out numbers, it was my intention to give the house an identity separate from the street or even the city.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.
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