"The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power."

"In time the whole family perked up like Sesame Street puppets, hoping that cheer, if worked at hard enough, could sugar the living and quiet the dead."

"Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time."

"Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous."

"The best thing she was, was her children."

"Write at the edges of the day."

"It never occurred to us that the Earth itself might have been unyielding."

"Sleep without the fragrance of her hair next to him was impossible."

"Nothing could be taken for granted. Women who loved you tried to cut your throat, while women who didn't even know your name scrubbed your back. Witches could sound like Katharine Hepburn and your best friend could try to strangle you. Smack in the middle of an orchid there might be a blob of jello and inside a Mickey Mouse doll, a fixed and radiant star."

"That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own."

"He licked his lips. 'Well, if you want my opinion-''I don't, ' She said. 'I have my own."

"She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind."

"I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it."

"He wondered if there was anyone in the world who liked him. Liked him for himself alone."

"I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got."

"What excited and challenged her shipmates horrified the churched women and each set believed the other deeply, dangerously flawed. Although they had nothing in common with the views of each other, they had everything in common with one thing: the promise and threat of men.Here, they agreed, was where security and risk lay. And both had come to terms."

"Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all."

"Women did what strawberry plants did before they shot out their thin vines: the quality of the green changed. Then the vine threads came, then the buds. By the time the white petals died and the mint-colored berry poked out, the leaf shine was gilded tight and waxy."

"For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event."

"Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are."

"Dominion won by fear and secured by fear was still sweeter than any that could be got another way."

"To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The "better life" she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one."

"I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer " its dust and lowering skies."

"If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it."

"Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the consolation of a clan. Baptists, Presbyterians, tribe, army, family, some encircling outside thing was needed. Pride, she thought. Pride alone made them think that they needed only themselves, could shape life that way, like Adam and Eve, like gods from nowhere beholden to nothing except their own creations. She should have warned them, but her devotion cautioned against impertinence. As long as Sir was alive it was easy to veil the truth: that they were not a family-not even a like-minded group. They were orphans, each and all."

"You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't, do you? And neither does he. You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself."

"More it hurt more better it is. Can't nothing heal without pain, you know."

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

"I laughed but before I could agree with the hairdressers that she was crazy, she said, 'What's the world for if you can't make it up the way you want it?'" 'The way I want it?'" 'Yeah. The way you want it. Don't you want it to be something more than what it is?'" 'What'st eh point? I can't change it.'" 'That's the point. If you don't, it will change you and it'll be your fault cause you let it. I let it. And messed up my life.'" 'Mess it up how?'" 'Forgot it.'" 'Forgot?'" 'Forgot it was mine. My life. I just ran up and down the streets wishing I was somebody else."

"How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it."

"I can't tell you why I was in love with her. People didn't require that much as they do now. Folks were expected to be civilized to one another, honest, and - and clear. You relied on people being what they said they were, because there was no other way to survive."

"Violet learned then what she had forgotten until this moment: that laughter is serious. More complicated, more serious than tears."

"People say to write about what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don't know anything. So write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever."

"Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it."

"She led him to the top of the stairs, where light came straight from the sky because the second-story windows of that house had been placed in the pitched ceiling and not the walls. There were two rooms and she took him into one of them, hoping he wouldn't mind the fact that she was not prepared; that though she could remember desire, she had forgotten how it worked; the clutch and helplessness that resided in the hands; how blindness was altered so that what leapt to the eye were places to lie down, and all else-doorknobs, straps, hooks, the sadness that crouched in corners, and the passing of time-was interference."

"Jump, if you want to, 'cause I'll catch you, girl. I'll catch you "fore you fall. Go as far inside as you need to, I'll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out. I'm not saying this because I need a place to stay. That's the last thing I need. I told you, I'm a walking man, but I been heading in this direction for seven years. Walking all around this place. Upstate, downstate, east, west; I been in territory ain't got no name, never staying nowhere long. But when I got here and sat out there on the porch, waiting for you, well, I knew it wasn't the place I was heading toward; it was you. We can make a life, girl. A life."

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

"And in all those escapes he could not help being astonished by the beauty of this land that was not his. He his in its breast, fingered its earth for food, clung to its banks to lap water and tried not to love it. On nights when the sky was personal, weak with the weight of its own stars, he made himself not love it. Its graveyards and its low-lying rivers. Or just a house - solitary under a chinaberry tree; maybe a mule tethered and the light hitting its hide just so. Anything could stir him and he tried hard not to love it."

"Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant within a human landscape."

"It's gonna hurt, now," said Amy. "anything dead coming back to life hurts."

"Black women were armed, black women were dangerous and the less money they had the deadlier the weapon they chose."

"There is honey in this land sweeter than any I know of, and I have cut cane in places where the dirt itself tasted like sugar, so that's saying a heap."

"Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you."

"You got a life? Live it! Live the motherfuckin' life!"

"The complexity of the so-called individual that's been praised for decades in America somehow has narrowed itself to the 'me'. When I was a young girl we were called citizens " American citizens. We were second-class citizens, but that was the word. In the 50s and 60s they started calling us consumers. So we did " consume. Now they don't use those words any more " it's the American taxpayer and those are different attitudes."

"I stood there a long while, staring at that tree. It looked so strongSo beautiful. Hurt right down the middleBut alive and well. Cee touched my shoulderLightly. Frank? Yes? Come on, brother. Let's go home."

"In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection. It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when she dragged herself off to bed, having spent another day without his presence, her heart beat like a gloved fist against her ribs. And in the morning, long before she was fully awake, she felt a longing so bitter and tight it yanked her out of a sleep swept clean of dreams."

"Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live."

"I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. 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."

"It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being."