If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.

I wanted to separate color from race. Distinguishing color - light, black, in-between - as the marker for race is really an error.

Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.

She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be - for a woman. And that no one would ever be that version of herself which she sought to reach out to and touch with an ungloved hand. There was only her own mood and whim, and if that was all there was, she decided to turn the naked hand toward it, discover it and let others become as intimate with their own selves as she was.

But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day.

I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.

You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?