Oh, Celie, unbelief is a terrible thing. And so is the hurt we cause others unknowingly.

After all, how can a society flourish, a country attain democracy and health, children grow into intelligent beings, sensitive to the needs of an ever more fragile and endangered planet, if half it's people are kept out of the driver's seat?

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

Well, sometime Mr —— git on me pretty hard. I have to talk to Old Maker. But he my husband. I shrug my shoulders. This life soon be over, I say. Heaven last all ways. You ought to bash Mr —— head open, she say. Think bout heaven later.

No song or poem will bear my mother's name. Yet so many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother's stories.

Poetry, I have discovered, is always unexpected and always as faithful and honest as dreams.

The infinite faith I have in people's ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior.