It had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping laugh. She had forgotten how deep and down it could be. So different from the miscellaneous giggles and smiles she had learned to be content with these past few years.

Let your face speak what's in your heart.

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.

Black people's music is in a class by itself and always has been. There's nothing like it. The reason for that is because it was not tampered with by white people. It was not on the media. It was not anywhere except where black people were. And it is one of the art forms in which black people decided what is good in it. Nobody told them. What surfaced and what floated to the top, were the giants and the best.

We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.

Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader.

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