Gloria Naylor

“Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.”

“You can't teach talent. You can't put in what God left out - but you can teach confidence.”

“Lord keep her safe since you can't keep her sane.”

“Old as she was, she still missed her daddy sometimes.”

“I don't believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.”

“Home. It's being new and old all rolled into one. Measuring your new against old friends, old ways, old places, Knowing that as long as the old survives, you can keep changing as much as you want without the nightmare of waking up to a total stranger.”

“One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.”

“She could walk through a lightning storm without being touched; grab a bolt of lightning in the palm of her hand; use the heat of lightning to start the kindling going under her medicine pot. She turned the moon into salve, the stars into swaddling cloth, and healed the wounds of every creature walking up on two or down on four.”

“Self-consciousness is really a form of egotism.”

“I realize at one point, that I was being followed, and then I began to see the surveillance that was going past the road on my house. And so, these cars began to surveil me. People began to follow me around, and it did, it was very disrupting to think that your privacy was being violated, and for no reason that I could come up with.”

“Spoiled. That's all it's about - can't live without this, can't live without that. You can live without anything you weren't born with, and you can make it through on even half of that.”

“Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystallize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days.”

“But I don't believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or to make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.”

“The music in his laughter had a way of rounding off the missing notes in her soul.”

“I wrote what I felt I had to write, and I'm willing to put my own sanity and my reputation behind it.”

“The intelligence community, for the most part, has no accountability at all; to the Congress, to us the American people, and so they feel that they above the law.”

“They all trying to say something with music that you can't say with plain talk. There ain't really no words for love or pain. And the way I see it, only fools go around trying to talk their love or talk their pain. So the smart people make music and you can kinda hear about it without them saying anything.”

“Life is accepting what is and working from that.”