If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.

I don't wait to be struck by lightning and I don't need certain slants of light in order to be able to write.

Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.

A son ain't what a woman say. A son is what a man do.

My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen - not vagrants - hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him.

Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn't have each other you had nothing.

Two parents can't raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community - everybody - to raise a child. And the little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. It doesn't work for white people or for black people. Why are we hanging onto it, I don't know. It isolates people into little units - people need a larger unit.