Today is always here,' said Sethe. 'Tomorrow, never.

Books ARE a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.

I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.

Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses - young loving.

Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.

It's always seemed to me that black people's grace has been with what they do with language. In Lorrain, Ohio, when I was a child, I went to school with and heard the stories of Mexicans, Italians, and Greeks, and I listened. I remember their language, and a lot of it is marvelous. But when I think of things my mother or father or aunts used to say, it seems the most absolutely striking thing in the world.

What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.