You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.

I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it.

All the time, I'm afraid the thing that happened that made it all right for my mother to kill my sister could happen again. I don't know what it is, I don't know who it is, but maybe there is something else terrible enough to make her do it again. I need to know what that thing might be, but I don't want to. Whatever it is, it comes from outside this house, outside the yard, and it can come right on in the yard if it wants to. So I never leave this house and I watch over the yard, so it can't happen again and my mother won't have to kill me too.

Which was what love was: unmotivated respect.

Something that is loved is never lost.

Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s; it's choosing the ones you want.

Only her tight, tight eyes were left. They were always left...They were everything. Everything was there, in them...Thrown, in this way, into the binding conviction that only a miracle could relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She would see only what there was to see: the eyes of other people.