“I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.”

“Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.”

“If you just go get one of these little fine arts degrees or writing program degrees, it never forces you to confront your responsibility as narrator, whereas any of the social sciences make you at look the interaction between the storyteller and story. Hurston understood that. But then she and I write out of despised cultures that on some level we feel we're defending.”

“Everything I know, everything I put in my fiction, will hurt someone somewhere as surely as it will comfort and enlighten someone else. What then is my responsibility? What am I to restrain? What am I to fear and alter--my own nakedness or the grief of the reader? I want my stories to be so good they are unforgettable; to make my ideas live and my own terrors real for people I will never meet. It is a completely amoral writer's lust. If we begin to agree that some ideas are too dangerous, too bad to invite inside our heads, then we stop the storyteller completely. We silence everyone who would tell us something that might be painful in our vulnerable moments.”

“I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.”

“Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different..." from Two or Three Things i Know For Sure”

“Write to your fear.”

“Can a book make such a difference? Can it change you utterly?I know it can.(First essay from The Book That Changed My Life, edited by Roxanne J. Coady & Joy Johannessen)”

“Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.”

“Piece by piece, my mother is being stolen from me.”

“I made my life, the same way it looks like you're gonna make yours—out of pride and stubbornness and too much anger. You better think hard, Ruth Anne, about what you want and who you're mad at. You better think hard.”