Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.

Anything I have ever learned of any consequence, I have learned from Black people. I have never been bored by any Black person, ever.

Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.

Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.

I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are

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.

I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important?