“Tell people the hammered truth, and it will ring like steel against an anvil.”

“So now you know that, as dark as the depths of the sea may be, as dark as the night gets without a moon, it is not really true darkness. It's just waiting for light to return. There are places that...”

“I had always thought of home not as a house, or even a place, but a feeling of safety and acceptance, a warm light when the rest of the world was a dark, forbidding place.Whenever my family was aro...”

“We each have our belssings and our curses. In the end it makes us equals.”

“Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.”

“The only honest way to approach the question of whiteness and blackness is to start by accepting that these are arbitrary categories that were invented in the 17th and 18th century in order to just...”

“I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be ...”