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

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.

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 think if Jeremy Corbyn got a cloak, he'd make a very good Gandalf.

... the greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul.

So damn pigheaded. I’ve studied you, not to report you, Caspar, but because I want a relationship with you.

There are no outdoor sports as graceful as throwing stones at a dictatorship.

Film can't just be a long line of bliss. There's something we all like about the human struggle.

Rock 'n' roll has to be destroyed and rebuilt in my name if it's ever gonna accomplish anything.

Finally, what I really want is to be happy in this moment, where the magic and miracles happen. Stay in the moment and all gifts are added as you breathe and take inspired action.

Everybody needs somebody sometimes.

During one of my early seminars, there were a bunch of seminar junkies there.

The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture. --The Fruit Hunters