“He wants to put his story next to hers.”

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.

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

Lonely was much better than alone.

Anything dead coming back to life hurts.

I type in one place, but I write all over the house.

There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.

Writing is really a way of thinking–not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.

To love someone means to see them as God intended them.

To love someone means to see them as God intended them.

Do you ever tried to make someone suffer by not texting them and you suffered more?

She is the answer to my every prayer.

I never look at anyone the way I look at you.

Stars fade away in the morning, but your beauty still remains evident. Perhaps stars envy you.

She is whisky in a teacup.

How your words and pauses have become mine. How you are a full stop to my every line. You have colored me with your thoughts, red and white. The tinge of my blood and the pure divine.