“How old did you have to be before you learned the difference between the simulacrum of love and the reality?”

“No, the magic doesn't wear off at midnight. It's much more powerful than that. It comes from you. You wanted something, and so it came to be.”

“The dead should not have to answer to the claims of the living, even the sharpest grief.”

“Killing someone usually turns out to be an enormously complicated solution to what was a much simpler problem.”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”

“No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.”

“When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women”

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”