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

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

In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent. This is precisely the time when artists go to work.

Something that is loved is never lost.

You don’t have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.

Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.

I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.

Navigating a white male world was not threatening. It wasn’t even interesting. I was more interesting than they were.

Love is never any better than the lover.

You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.

You are your best thing.

I didn’t want to speak for black people. I wanted to speak to and to be among. It’s us.

I’ve spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.

Man is the circled oak; woman the ivy.

Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.

I’ve never before been so aware of the thousands of little good things, the thousands of things that go right every day.

If you love what you do and are willing to do what it takes, it’s within your reach.

A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.

Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.

Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

Building a wardrobe is like building a circle of friends your whole life…. Your own beauty is to be yourself, but of course we need tools and accessories.