The slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.

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

I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through.

What distinguished my life from my brother's is that my mother didn't like me. When I became a woman, I seemed to repel her.

Writing is not a profession. It's a calling. It's almost holy.

The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark. The longer they are kept apart—idea of thing, reality of thing—the wider the width, the deeper the depth, the thicker and darker the darkness.

I wouldn't mind being labeled as "angry," if it wasn't used once again to denigrate and belittle.