To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom.

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.

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.

The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.

In Tar Baby, the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from multiple forms of interaction with the world as a play of difference that cannot be completely comprehended.

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.