Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. the lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glance of the lover’s inward eyes.

Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.

When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.' 'I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.

The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time.

My daddy's face is a study. Winter moves into it and presides there. His eyes become a cliff of snow threatening to avalanche, his eyebrows bend like black limbs of leafless trees. His skin takes on the pale cheerless yellow of winter sun; for a jaw he has the edges of a snowbound field dotted with stubble; his high forehead is the frozen sweep of the Erie.

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.