Image: John Mathew Smith (celebrity-photos.com), CC BY-SA 2.0
49 quotes
African American novelist, essayist, and academic (1931–2019)
“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.”
"Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear."
on Writing
"Birth, life, and death― each took place on the hidden side of a leaf."
on Life
"It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being."
on Love
"Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.'Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part."
on Death
"What's fair ain't necessarily right."
on Truth
"All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allow"
on Social Justice
"When fear rules, obedience is the only survival choice."
on Fear
"God puzzled her and she was too ashamed of Him to say so."
on Faith
"Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it."
"Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth."
on Childhood
"What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?"
"All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in., March 9, 1998]"
"All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was."
on Nature
"Wanna fly you got to give up the shit that weighs you down."
on Inspirational
"Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it."
"As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think."
on Leadership
"If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it."
on Freedom
"She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order."
on Relationships
"The function of freedom is to free someone else."
"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."
