Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.

It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds.

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.

Like Guitar in Son of Solomon, and Son in Tar Baby, he believed that harmony could never exist between the races.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.

I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.