She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.

At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough.

I don't do the things other people call "play."

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

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

...black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female. It's not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don't write very differently from white men.

It's bliss when you give up all that stuff that separates you from other human beings. It's hard, but you break down all that stuff.