“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.

We can always stick together when we are losing, but tend to find means of breaking up when we’re winning.

The truth of the matter is we have become more interested in designer jeans and break dancing than we are in obligations and responsibilities.

Dream big don’t let anybody or anything break your wishbone. Stay strong, full of faith, and courageous. Keep that backbone straight. And along the way, don’t forget to laugh and enjoy the journey.

I like you here, between commas, where the only thing you can break now, is my lines.

You love so perfectly, as if you have never been told a heart can be broken.

The cholera had broken out at the post, and five or six men were dying daily.

There is one thing I would break up over, and that is if she caught me with another woman. I won’t stand for that.

When I told you that I hadn’t been broken before; it wasn’t a fucking challenge.