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

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.

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.

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

The journey of fire begins, survives and ends with air.

Breathing dreams like air.

I feel like my breath is muffled, and my heart is too heavy to beat, as if I’m drowning in a pool of air.

Hawaii is paradise. It sounds cheesy to say it, but there’s music in the air there.

I felt quite at home, / As if it were mine sleeping lazily / In this house of fresh air.

What is lawful is not binding only on some and not binding on others. Lawfulness extends everywhere, through the wide-ruling air and the boundless light of the sky.

But come, hear my words, for truly learning causes the mind to grow. For as I said before in declaring the ends of my words: Twofold is the truth I shall speak; for at one time there grew to be the one alone out of many, and at another time it separated so that there were many out of the one; fire and water and earth and boundless height of air, and baneful Strife apart from these, balancing each of them, and Love among them, their equal in length and breadth.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.