I've come to see that I'm saying something that people generally do not want to hear.

Someone who knew me well once accused me of being unromantic. And that's probably true: I don't trust romance.

My disappointments stand up and grow ever taller. They will not be lost to me.

People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you're writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone's brown skin.

There are things that make us choose, on certain days, on certain nights, the opposite of love, in all its variations. But I want to acknowledge that with love and hate it's not simply one or the other. It's at least two, three, four, five different emotions existing at once, side by side, a broad spectrum of things alive.

The shadow of my mother danced around the room to a tune that my own shadow sang.

My writing has always been met with derision or dismissal.