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

Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live

There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war. It is larger than that. The peace I am thinking of is not at the mercy of history's rule, nor is it a passive surrender to the status quo. The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one -- an activity that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/writing world we live in. Accessible as it is, this particular kind of peace warrants vigilance.

At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.

Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.

...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.