The isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia.

I don't work. I keep telling people I'm unemployed. And I don't wash dishes, and I don't wash clothes, and I don't clean my house. Somebody else does that.

He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. ‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers. ‘Me? Me?

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.

Misery don't call ahead. That's why you have to stay awake - otherwise it just walks on in your door.

I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational, nor naïve - because art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond cost, into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.