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

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.

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

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who overcomes his enemies.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

2AM where do i begin, Crying off my face again, The silent sound of lonliness, Wants to follow me to bed

Forgive your child and yourself nightly. You didn't ask to live with the effects of ADHD any more than did your child.

And now too late, we see these things are one: The art is sacrifice and self-control And who loves beauty must be stern of soul.

[On Paris:] A city never entirely known, yet which gives you the feeling of intimacy, of possessing it intimately.

The average 20-year-old serving us in Iraq knows more about their country's national security than the average 20-year political veteran serving in the Congress today.

Choosing a path means having to miss out on others

The man who thinks only of his own generation is born for few.

It is more honorable to repair a wrong than to persist in it.