This word "LOVE" - discredited, "clicheed" - can be restored and love, the instinct, the impulse to care for somebody in the hope that somebody will care for you - plus our language, the language, a language - is about all we have. With everything else going on, this is what makes us, what keeps us human.

To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.

Long before I was a success, my parents made me feel like I could be one.

I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.

My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

My daddy's face is a study. Winter moves into it and presides there. His eyes become a cliff of snow threatening to avalanche, his eyebrows bend like black limbs of leafless trees. His skin takes on the pale cheerless yellow of winter sun; for a jaw he has the edges of a snowbound field dotted with stubble; his high forehead is the frozen sweep of the Erie.

Political doesn't necessarily mean you have an agenda.