Evil is just sort of ultimately boring. The good thing is just complicated. It's more provocative to me and more stimulating to me.

I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don't read them later.

...black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female. It's not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don't write very differently from white men.

But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day.

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.

Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.

Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there.