Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured

Lonely, ain't it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.

There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war. It is larger than that. The peace I am thinking of is not at the mercy of history's rule, nor is it a passive surrender to the status quo. The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one -- an activity that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/writing world we live in. Accessible as it is, this particular kind of peace warrants vigilance.

Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

All important things are hard.

Sometimes what I write on the page frightens me, so I feel free when I write, but I don't feel safe.

When you think of sexual liberation, which women wanted to have or not have children, which is the choice, not a command, and other kinds of things they wanted in their relationships with their husbands, or partners or what have you, became for subsequent generations some license that they themselves feel, that is absolutely demeaning and mean younger and younger and younger.