“When you're a kid all you know is that your dad puts on his suit or overalls and vanishes from your life until nightfall. Sometimes my pops came back exhausted and scarlet-eyed, as if he'd been eng...”

“So you're lost, uh? Happens a lot out here. You walk around for days, seeing things, losing your bearings, crying out for God, But He can't hear you. You can scream and scream but nobody'll ever he...”

“A sense of desolation settled within me: a cold, slimy stone lodged under my lungs. There was nothing happy about the woods, I thought, especially at night.”

“You can't hate your best friend for taking opportunities he'd been given. That would be the worst sort of hate, wouldn't it? Because it would mean you hate yourself, too.”

“Did you know that the Russians sent dogs into space? My mother told me this when I was a boy. Nobody knew the effects of space on a body, you see, so they sent dogs first. They found two little mon...”

“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.”