"Why is it sports is the only thing white people see us being successful at? I don't want to play football," he said. "I wanna be a lawyer." "That's fine with me," I said, a little annoyed. "I've just never heard of a Negro lawyer, that's all. You've got to hear of these things before you can imagine them." "Bullshit. You gotta imagine what's never been."

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.

If you need something from somebody always give that person a way to hand it to you.

Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.

I could even feel how perishable all my moments really were, how all my life they had come to me begging to be lived, to be cherished even.

How could I choose someone who would force me to give up my own small reach for meaning? I chose myself, and without consolation.

History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another's pain in the heart our own.