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

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.

Today is always here,’ said Sethe. ‘Tomorrow, never.

You have to be a little tough, and rely on yourself. And tell people ‘No’.

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.

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

In the gates of eternity the black hand and the white hand hold each other with equal clasp.

I saw for the first time the earth’s shape. I could easily see the shores of continents, islands, great rivers, folds of the terrain, large bodies of water. The horizon is dark blue, smoothly turning to black. The feelings which filled me I can express with one word-joy.

We ought even to hold as a fixed principle that what I see white I believe to be black, if the superior authorities define it to be so.

We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears white is really black, if the hierarchy of the Church so decides.

If you have the power to see things through somebody else’s eyes, it’s like going from black and white to color or two dimensions to three dimensions.

It could have been worse. I could have been born black.

I am a Negro: Black as the night is black, Black like the depths of my Africa.