Can't nothing heal without pain, you know.

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.' Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.

I tell my students there is such a thing as 'writer's block,' and they should respect it. You shouldn't write through it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now.

Movements toward freedom and the self-respect that comes from something other than what people think is their most important feature.

They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds― cooled ―and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.

A son ain't what a woman say. A son is what a man do.