At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.

What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?

A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves — a special kind of double.

Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.

My daddy's face is a study. Winter moves into it and presides there. His eyes become a cliff of snow threatening to avalanche, his eyebrows bend like black limbs of leafless trees. His skin takes on the pale cheerless yellow of winter sun; for a jaw he has the edges of a snowbound field dotted with stubble; his high forehead is the frozen sweep of the Erie.

When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do.

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names.

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world? Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old.

American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.