The men began to trade tales of atrocities, first stories they had heard, then those they'd witnessed, and finally the things that had happened to themselves. A litany of personal humiliation, outrage, and anger turned sicklelike back to themselves as humor. They laughed then, uproariously, about the speed with which they had run, the pose they had assumed, the ruse they had invented to escape or decrease some threat to their manliness, their humanness. All but Empire State, who stood, broom in hand and drop-lipped, with the expression of a very intelligent ten-year-old.

The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.

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

I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.

Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.