Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

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

You looked at me then like you knew me, and I thought it really was Eden, and I couldn't take your eyes in because I was loving the hoof marks on your cheeks.

There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.

An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.

What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?