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“After reading Bambara, I wondered for the first time how great an American sentence, paragraph, or book could be if it wasn't, at least partially, written to and for black Americans in the Deep South.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“She meant depressions, for da had had them: big, massive, scudding, whopping, black-cloud, infectious, crow, raven, jackdaw, coffin-upon-coffin, catacomb-upon-catacomb, skeletons-upon-skulls-upon-bones crawling along the ground to the grave type of depressions.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“For the original transgression of this land was not slavery. It was greed, and it could not be contained. More white men would come and begin to covet. And they would drag along the Africans they had enslaved. The white men would sow their misery among those who shook their chains. These white men would whip and work and demean these Africans. They would sell their children and split up families. And these white men brought by Oglethorpe, these men who had been oppressed in their own land by their own king, forgot the misery that they had left behind, the poverty, the uncertainty. And they resurrected this misery and passed it on to the Africans.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“Within her there seems to be a rattling; from little stones, from stalks, from days when it never quits. Inside her the sky empties itself in slow, unresolving fashion, and there isn’t anything worth naming in the fridge.”
― Dorthe Nors, Spejl, skulder, blink