Food for her is not food, it is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruit she always offered us were picked from the destroyed brances of out family tree.

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

But I dig Negroes. I dig them all the way.

If people thought about food more like how we think about the environment, a lot of people would be eating differently and the whole system would look a lot different.

She was so beautiful, like someone who you will never meet, but always dream of meeting, like someone who is too good for you.

She repeats things until they are true, or until she can't tell whether they are true or not. She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be.

He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.