"Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear."

"The box had done what Sweet Home had not, what working like an ass and living like a dog had not: drove him crazy so he would not lose his mind."

"One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to."

"All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was."

"Birth, life, and death- each took place on the hidden side of a leaf."

"Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city."

"You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?"

"Outside, snow solidified itself into graceful forms. The peace of winter stars seemed permanent."

"I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some thins you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still here. If a house burns down, it's done, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or know, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened."

"There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises....If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest, not what pays."

"I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean."

"I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life."

"Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love a free man is never safe."

"I've traveled. All over. I've never seen anything like you. How could anything be put together like you? Do you know how beautiful you are? Have you looked at yourself?''I'm looking now."

"Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form."

"Not knowing it was hard, knowing it was harder."

"Take off that coat,' he told him.'Sir?''You heard me.'The boy slipped out of his jacket, whining, 'What you gonna do? What I'm gonna wear?'The man untied the baby from her chest and wrapped it in the boy's coat, knotting the sleeves in front.'What I'm gonna wear?'The old man sighed and, after a pause, said, 'You want it back then go head and take it off that baby. Put the baby naked in the grass and put your coat back on. And if you can do it, then go on 'way somewhere and don't come back."

"Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul."

"If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it."

"Apparently he thought he deserved only to be loved--from a distance, though--and given what he wanted. And in return he would be . . . what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhappiness."

"No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you."

"She stopped then and turned her face toward him and the hateful wind."

"Daily life took as much as she had. The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind. And if it didn't stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out."

"When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same."

"You your own best thing, Sethe. You are."

"You think because he doesn't love you that you are worthless. You think because he doesn't want you anymore that he is right- that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Hagar, don't. It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn't be like that."

"If I hadn't trained Lula Ann properly she wouldn't have known to always cross the street and avoid white boys."

"He talking Louisiana, you speaking Tennessee. The music so different, the sound coming from a different part of the body. It must of been like hearing lyrics set to scores by two different composers. But when you made love he must of have said I love you and you understood that and it was true, too, because I have seen the desperation in his eyes ever since-no matter what business venture he thinks up."

"As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think."

"I'll tend to her as no mother ever tended a child, a daughter. Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my own children. I never had to give it to nobody else--and the one time I did it was took from me--they held me down and took it. Milk that belonged to my baby.... I know what it is to be without the milk that belongs to you; to have to fight and holler for it, and to have so little left."

"The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it."

"It comforts everybody to think of all Negroes as dirt poor, and to regard those who were not, who earned good money and kept it, as some kind of shameful miracle. White people liked that idea because Negroes with money and sense made them nervous. Colored people liked it because, in those days, they trusted poverty, believed it was a virtue and a sure sign of honesty. Too much money had a whiff of evil and somebody else's blood."

"These and other inanimate things she saw and experienced. They were real to her. She knew them. They were the codes and touchstones of the world, capable of translation and possession. She owned the crack that made her stumble; she owned the clumps of dandelions whose white heads, last fall, she had blown away; whose yellow heads, this fall, she peered into. And owning them made her part of the world, and the world a part of her."

"It's been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it's about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion."

"I like marriage. The idea."

"Grownups don't pay it much attention because they can't imagine anything more majestic to a child than their own selves and so confused dependance for reverence."

"Poison is like the drowned, it always floats."

"My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children."

"You are nothing but wilderness. No constraint. No mind.You shout the word-mind, mind, mind-over and over and then you laugh, saying as I live and breathe, a slave by choice."

"Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow."

"When fear rules, obedience is the only survival choice."

"From the windows, through the fur of snow, the landscape became more melancholy when the sun successfully brightened the quiet trees, unable to speak without their leaves."

"We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that."

"We will be judged by how well we love."

"Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth."

"Her passions were narrow but deep."

"You know, the kind who know Jesus by His first name, but out of politeness never use it even to His face."

"The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love."

"I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it."

"I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort."