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.

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

They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations.

Deep, deep trouble. Can't rival the dead for love. Lose every time.

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.

...black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female. It's not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don't write very differently from white men.

The Administration of the United States is such dread I almost feel paralyzed.