Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away

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

It's been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it's about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion.

You looking good." "Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.

Sometimes what I write on the page frightens me, so I feel free when I write, but I don't feel safe.

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.