Quotes about Identity

Being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn't limit my imagination; it expands it," Toni Morrison, who turns eighty-eight today

for in their secret awareness of Him, He was not the God of three faces they sang about. They knew quite well that He had four, and that the fourth explained Sula.

The eyes are petulant, mischievous. To Pecola they are simply pretty. She eats the candy, and its sweetness is good. To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane.

The fathers may soar, they may triumph, they may leave, but the children know who they are; they remember, half in glory and half in accusation.

Maybe I am different now, Twyla. But you're not. You're the same little state kid who kicked a poor old black lady when she was down on the ground. You kicked a black lady and you have the nerve to call me a bigot.

Thrown, in this way, into the binding conviction that only a miracle could relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She would only see what there was to see: the eyes of other people.

Of all the wishes people had brought him—money, love, revenge—this seemed to him the most poignant and the one most deserving of fulfillment. A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. His outrage grew and felt like power.

Navigating a white male world was not threatening. It wasn't even interesting. I was more interesting than they were.

Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph were forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be

The impulse to do and revere art is an ancient need - whether on cave walls, on ones own body, a cathedral or religious rite, we hunger for a way to articulate who we are and what we mean.

What are you? Some kinda mermaid?" one man had shouted, and reached hurriedly for his socks.

for one's language, the one we dream in, is home.