if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away

When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.' 'I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

It was becoming a habit-this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had. *Milkman*

I have difficulties with contemporary language. Big difficulties. I counted, you know, something like 160 words have disappeared from the English language because of the use of the word "like." "I'm like, he's like" - not "thought," not "as if ."

I lived in a little working-class town that had no black neighborhoods at all - one high school. We all played together. Everybody was either somebody from the South or an immigrant from East Europe or from Mexico. And there was one church, and there were four elementary schools. And we were all, pretty much until the end of the war, very, very poor.

At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough.