I don't wait to be struck by lightning and I don't need certain slants of light in order to be able to write.

I don't wait to be struck by lightning and I don't need certain slants of light in order to be able to write.

you got two feet, Sethe, not four." he said, and right then a forest sprang up between them; tactless and quiet.

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.

Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.

I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.

Lonely was much better than alone.