I dream a dream that dreams back at me.

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.

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.

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. For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people. She wept then. Tears for the deaths of the littlest things: the castaway shoes of children; broken stems of marsh grass battered and drowned by the sea; prom photographs of dead women she never knew; wedding rings in pawnshop windows; the tiny bodies of Cornish hens in a nest of rice.

Can't nothing heal without pain, you know.

You your own best thing, Sethe. You are.

You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.