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

I don't wait to be struck by lightning and I don't need certain slants of light in order to be able to write.

I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

Isolation, you know, carries the seeds of its own destruction because as times change, other things seep in.

Much handled things are always soft(27).

In my mother's church, everybody read the Bible and it was mostly about music. My mother had the most beautiful voice I have ever heard in my life. She could sing anything - classical, jazz, blues, opera. And people came from long distances to that little church she went to - African Methodist Episcopal, the AME church she belonged to - just hear her.

You looking good." "Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.