Anything dead coming back to life hurts.

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in. [Conversation with Elizabeth Farnsworth, PBS NewsHour, March 9, 1998]

If they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away

A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.

Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

I dream a dream that dreams back at me

To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom.

Not knowing it was hard; knowing it was harder

Something that is loved is never lost.

They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations...

What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.

The hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)

Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.

What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?

Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.

To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

Today is always here,' said Sethe. 'Tomorrow, never.

The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.

I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.

Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.' Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.

But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.

But the picking out, the choosing. Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind. My mind.

When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.' 'I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.

There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.

Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.

I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.

He licked his lips. ‘Well, if you want my opinion-‘ ‘I don’t, ‘ She said. ‘I have my own.

I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ‘em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.

I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, for the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.

Everything depends on knowing how much,” she said, and “Good is knowing when to stop.

It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.

It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves.

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

If you surrender to the wind you can ride it.

We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.

You looked at me then like you knew me, and I thought it really was Eden, and I couldn't take your eyes in because I was loving the hoof marks on your cheeks.

You looking good." "Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.

He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. ‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers. ‘Me? Me?

In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.

...the change was adjustment without improvement.