You could get slaves to do anything at all, bear anything, if you gave them any hope that they could keep their children.
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.
No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along.
But you said there was no defense.""There ain't.""Then what do I do?""Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on.
Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.
I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.
How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.
Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.
It's important to know who the real enemy is and to know the very real power that you have to defeat that enemy.
A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves—a special kind of double.
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.
I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.
I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else.'
There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
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.
This is precisely the time when artists go to work. Not when everything is fine, but in times of dread.
Anger...it's a paralyzing emotion. You can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling—I don't think it's any of that—it's helpless...
You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. 'Floods' is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where i
You need to say and do everything you can to show the beauty of life, the quality of life, the possibilities of life.
Don't let anybody, including yourself, tell you that you're too old or too young to do something. Anybody, including yourself.
At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.
At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. Make a difference about something other than yourselves.
