I Know That My Books Are Worthy,

Anything I Have Ever Learned Of Any Consequence, I Have Learned From Black People. I Have Never Been Bored By Any Black Person, Ever.

Beauty Was Not Simply Something To Behold; It Was Something One Could Do.

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. For Loneliness Assumed The Absence Of Other People, And The Solitude She Found In That Desperate Terrain Had Never Admitted The Possibility Of Other People. She Wept Then. Tears For The Deaths Of The Littlest Things: The Castaway Shoes Of Children; Broken Stems Of Marsh Grass Battered And Drowned By The Sea; Prom Photographs Of Dead Women She Never Knew; Wedding Rings In Pawnshop Windows; The Tiny Bodies Of Cornish Hens In A Nest Of Rice.

All Paradises, All Utopias Are Designed By Who Is Not There, By The People Who Are Not Allowed In.

I'm Interested In The Way In Which The Past Affects The Present And I Think That If We Understand A Good Deal More About History, We Automatically Understand A Great More About Contemporary Life.