I had come to feel that my mother's love for me was designed solely to make me into an echo of her; and I didn't know why, but I felt that I would rather be dead than become just an echo of someone.

I know that the fantastic amount of profit that people want to make on anything is damaging. And that none of us seem able to resist it.

The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.

Sometimes when someone says something stupid, my friends and I just read the reviews out loud and collapse with laughter at the stupidity of it all.

That the world I was in could be soft, lovely, and nourishing was more than I could bear, and so I stood there and wept, for I didn't want to love one more thing in my life, didn't want one more thing that could make my heart break into a million little pieces at my feet.

The people who invented race, who grouped us together as "black," were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong.

It's too easy to say this or that is "race," and that has been a vehicle for an incredible amount of wrong in the world.