No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you. - Toni Morrison

Which was what love was: unmotivated respect.

I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean.

Garner called and announced them men — but only on Sweet Home, and by his leave. Was he naming what he saw or creating what he did not?