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Like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.

It was a fine cry — loud and long — but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

"...but you were never really white in the first place. Nobody is. Nobody has, even, ever wanted to be white, unless they are afraid of being black. But being black is nothing to be afraid of. I knew that before I met you, and I have learned it again, through you. Perhaps being white is not a conceivable condition, but a terrifying fantasy, a moral choice.”

What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?

Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

It is not merely that the rain falls differently on each of you, for that can be a wonder and a joy: it is that what is rain for the one is not rain for the other.

I know what every colored woman in this country is doing. . . . Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I'm going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.

Passion is terrifying, it can rock you, change you, bring your head under, as when a wind rises from the bottom of the sea, and you're out there in the craft of your mortality, alone.

This may be why we appear to learn absolutely nothing from experience, or may, in other words, account for our incoherence: memory does not require that we reconstitute the event, but that we justify it.

Close up, the person's imperfections matter, but from far away, you see your own.

without love, pleasure withers quickly, becomes a foul taste on the palate, and pleasure’s inventions are soon exhausted. There must be a soul within the body you are holding, a soul which you are striving to meet, a soul which is striving to meet yours.

People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead.