The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

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.

Long before I was a success, my parents made me feel like I could be one.

She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?

More than fear of loving bears or birds bigger than cows, I fear pathless nights. How, I wonder, can I find you in the dark?

Evil is so seductive. It needs to grind you up and make you its slave.

Jealousy we understood and thought natural... But envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.