Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn't have each other you had nothing.

It was my father who could do no wrong. So I didn't think of it as, oh, look, my father's a violent man.

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.

True the Black woman did the housework, the drudgery; true, she reared the children, often alone, but she did all of that while occupying a place on the job market, a place her mate could not get or which his pride would not let him accept.And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself.

the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)

And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.

Life that crawled, life that slunk and crept and never closed its eyes. Life that burrowed and scurried, and life so still it was indistinguishable from the ivy stems on which it lay. Birth, life, and death - each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.