When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do.

When you stiffen, you know that whatever you stiffen about is very important. The stuff is important, the fear itself is information.

Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there.

Occasionally, as children, we might figure out how to call somebody a name, and they would figure out how to call us. But it wasn't - it was so light. It was so fluffy. I didn't really have a strong awareness of segregation and the separation of races until I left Lorain, Ohio.

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.

If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.

And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.