“Lonely was much better than alone.”

We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.

You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.

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

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

Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

All important things are hard.

Black people’s music is in a class by itself and always has been.

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

From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.

The function of freedom is to free someone else.

A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves – a special kind of double.

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

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

What a woman. What a life.

A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.

The greater the silence, the greater meaning it carries. The greater crowded, the greater loneliness. The greater love, the greater pain.

I wish to spend a lifetime near a lighthouse where loneliness will be the glimmer of luminous prancing upon ocean waves… rising and falling only for my breathing.

You will never feel alone, if you run down the stairs of loneliness; as every solitary step becomes your companion.

It was the weirdest thing ever. I said to myself: why are people always so okay with not having me in their lives?

I didn’t love you to seek revenge. I didn’t love you out of loneliness or unhappiness. I didn’t love you for any of the misguided reasons that time might convince you I did. I just loved you because you’re you.

The heart will welcome destruction to avoid tasting loneliness -why we stay.

I have no one to talk to, and no one I feel I am trying to find meaning in this nonsensical paradox, with my heart on fire, I am constantly trying to heal.

Loneliness breeds self-love.