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

America is not so much a country as it is an idea, and that must be why so many people are drawn to it, the idea of it, the idea that you might be free of your past, free of the traditions that kept you in your own traditions - that is the idea of it: freedom from your very own self.

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.

Something settiled inside me, something heavy and hard. It stayed there, and i could not think of one thing to make it go away. I thought, So this must be living, this must be the beginning of the time people later refer to as 'years ago, when I was young'.

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

Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath one could find worlds.

That was the moment he got the idea he possessed me in a certain way, and that was the moment I grew tired of him.