They had stared at her with great uncomprehending eyes. Eyes that questioned nothing and asked everything. Unblinking and unabashed, they stared up at her. The end of the world lay in their eyes, and the beginning, and all the waste in bewteen.

I don't think one parent can raise a child. I don't think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village.

Love is never any better than the lover.

Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission.

...black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female. It's not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don't write very differently from white men.

If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.

I began to realize that this idea of the lighter the better and the darker the worse was really - had an impact on sororities, on friendships, on all sorts of things, and it was stunning to me.