“Someone telling you about the future did not prepare you for it. Nothing prepared you for it.”

“He is a principled man, and compassionate, someone who will remind himself of your best qualities while struggling to forgive your worst. In short, he is a friend.”

“You dont know what its like to worry youll start to despise the people who help you, the ones you should love, because theyre healthy and youre not, because theyre kind and youre this angry, frustr...”

“How long did it take to become a gracious person? One who could accept help and give thanks without being resentful of it?”

“Ive found I still serve a purpose. I remind people to pray, to calculate the odds, to thank the fates, the gods, good karma, whatever it was that made this happen to me and not them. Im in the wors...”

“His voice was everything she equated with home.”

“Don't cry over someone who wouldn't cry over you.”

“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: youre falling to the floor crying ...”

“Weeping is not the same thing as crying. It takes your whole body to weep, and when it's over, you feel like you don't have any bones left to hold you up.”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”

“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.”