“I think being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world. ”

“I think being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world. ”

“But there was, she knew, something else. Happiness, she supposed. Whatever that might be. What, exactly, she wondered, was happiness. Very positively she wanted it.”

“I think being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world. ”

“Children aren't everything. There are other things in the world, thought I admit some people don't seem to suspect it. ”

“It was only that she wanted him to be happy, resenting, however, his inability to be so with things as they were, and never acknowledging that though she did want him to be happy, it was only in her own way and by some plan of hers for him that she truly desired him to be so.”

“Everything can't be explained by some general biological phrase.”

“The trouble with Clare was, not only that she wanted to have her cake and eat it too, but that she wanted to nibble at the cakes of other folk as well.”

“It hurt. It hurt like hell. But it didn’t matter, if no one knew.”

“For several years, while I searched for, found, and studied black women writers, I deliberately shut O'Connor out, feeling almost ashamed that she had reached me first. And yet, even when I no longer read her, I missed her, and realized that though the rest of America might not mind, having endured it so long, I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have to read Zora Hurston and Flannery O'Connor, Nella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner, before I could begin to feel well read at all.”