Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

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.

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

I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ‘em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more

True the Black woman did the housework, the drudgery; true, she reared the children, often alone, but she did all of that while occupying a place on the job market, a place her mate could not get or which his pride would not let him accept.And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself.

They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations.