“There were two ways of looking at it: imagining that it was far away and big, in the first place; in the second, that it was small and near. But at any rate, a stupid, hard, brown mountain. How she...”

“but the crime is more important than the punishment. I enliven all of me in my happy instinct for destruction.”

“I ask myself: is every story that has ever been written in this world, a story of suffering and affliction?”

“In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.”

“Where does music go when its not playing?she asked herself. And disarmed she would answer: May they make a harp out of my nerves when I die.”

“I have grown weary of literature: silence alone comforts me. If I continue to write, its because I have nothing more to accomplish in this world except to wait for death. Searching for the word in ...”

“We all wind up drawn to what we're afraid of, drawn to try to find a way to make ourselves safe from a thing by crawling inside of it, by loving it, by becoming it.”

“I didnt know I was in a prison until I was told I could go no further than where I am. It was in that moment that I determined to free myself. I am becoming much greater than I am today. I need the...”

“Philosophically speaking, values are the termini of our intentions. We never fully achieve them.”

“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.”