“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

“Intellectual 'work' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legisl...”

“After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.”

“Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.”

“The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.”

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”

“You can't pray a lie--I found that out.”

“If you think it aint dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way, by yourself, in the night, you try it once youll see.”

“It inspired a kind of Huck Finn moment when I decided it was better to risk hell than shrivel in the midst of a toxic Southern Baptist morality.”

“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.”