I know what every colored woman in this country is doing... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.

Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm.

From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.

Usually I try to be there by six. Everything has been taken off the walls so that there's nothing to arrest my sight. On the bed I have Roget's Thesaurus, a dictionary, a Bible, and a deck of playing cards.

A man ain't nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that's somebody.

Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me...my lonely is mine.

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.