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

The concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the Western world, and we should have nothing to do with it.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

But maybe a man was nothing but a man, which is what Baby Suggs always said. They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely that was, they studied your scars and tribulations, after which they did what he had done: ran her children out and tore up the house. [...] A man ain't nothing but a man,' said Baby Suggs. 'But a son? Well now, that's somebody.

My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.