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.

I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are

Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.

Write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever.

Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.

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

American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.