It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.

Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.

I know it's trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it's all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that.

Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission.

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

I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don't read them later.

Only her tight, tight eyes were left. They were always left...They were everything. Everything was there, in them...Thrown, in this way, into the binding conviction that only a miracle could relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She would see only what there was to see: the eyes of other people.