Did every step feel like the running leap a bird takes before flight?

Grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief.

By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.

I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.

My father owned pit bulls when I was young. He sometimes fought them. My brother and a lot of the men in my community owned pit bulls as well: sometimes they fought them for honor, never for money.

While I've said that there are plenty of things I dislike about the South, I can be clear that there are things I love about the South.

I wanted to be my own heroine.

That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.

I think that I'm trying to hopefully change my children's ideas about what is possible, and about what is possible for them.

I wanted to write about voodoo tradition that I feel has been very important to survival of black people here: people of the African diaspora, people of this region, and throughout the south.

There is laughter, shrill calls. Everyone is flirting, saying in nudges and jokes and blushing what they would do in private

If you put me on a pedestal, I will fall off because I can never achieve the perfection of your expectations.

My mother is a walking miracle.

A negative and toxic person never feels teased with the genuine presence of the pretenders in his network and he always feels pleased with the absence of the genuine leader in his circle.

Never start a war with something you can't talk to.

America has furnished to the world the character of Washington. And if our American institutions had done nothing else, that alone would have entitled them to the respect of mankind.

I'm more a competitive person.

Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.

My one purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.

I cannot tell you anything that you don't already know, but it is known in silence.

Never miss a moment to encourage someone you work with.