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

To get to a place where you could love anything you chose – not to need permission for desire – well now that was freedom.

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.

What a woman. What a life.

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

Each moment that passes changes you. You can’t even own yourself. How can you ever hope to own anyone or anything else.

It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.

You make my life so hard but that’s what gets me off.

Some things are more precious because they don’t last long.

Everything that comes together falls apart.

I’m scared that every girl I care for will find a better man and end up happier in the long run.

I just hope that you miss me a little when I’m gone.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.