Quotes from Tananarive Due

Your past is your shadow. It has form but no substance, except in the places you allow it to touch you.

We only waste energy to have horrible fights with the people we love the most.

I've spent my adult life trying to mend the mistakes I made when I was young, which is what we all do, I suppose—

Black history is black horror.

My mother used to say to me that she collected sorrows and put them in her pocket. Walking around with them that way, by and by, you just learn to carry them all a bit better, to stand up a bit straighter. That's all life is, on this earth anyway.

You just give me one more good reason," Angela said to the house from the road, "and when I am finished with you, I will burn you to the fucking ground. Don't think I won't.

Danielle wasn't sure if she was patient and wise, or if she was a tragedy unfolding slowly, one hot summer day at a time.

How else, except through being alone for a while, could you ever discover who you really are? But

The dreams don't scare me," Abbie said. "It's the opposite. I'm sad to wake up. As if I belong there, in the water, and my bedroom is the dream.

That's the difference between us and white folks, she told herself. They don't stop to say "I can't" or "Should I," they just do.

you know everybody has a turn, and you just try to find something interesting every day to make you glad it hasn't happened yet.

One thing marriage counseling instilled in Hilton was a compulsion for open communication. Whether at home or at work, he knew that anything left unsaid was far more dangerous than spoken words could be, no matter how hurtful.

Is that your lesson?" she asked him. "I'm sorry to hear that, because you always said just the opposite. Love what you have while you have it, before it's gone. Isn't that what you were always trying to tell me?" Her damp eyes glimmered.

Bernadette never said these things aloud like an evil stepmother in a fairy-tale, but she didn't have to. Letitia knew words were only part of who people were, and usually the least important part.

When you know someone in the flesh, you know that person only in part," he told her. "A man's teachings are more important than his flesh form. Flesh is an illusion.

Her mother used to say that hope was nothing but a heartache that hadn't happened yet. But Angela was still addicted to it. She had never learned how to give it up.

In traditional science fiction, according to Robert Heinlein, there are three lines of thought that drive writers: "What if—" [What if we built a colony on Mars?] "If only—" [If only we could fix past mistakes by travelling through time.] And "If this goes on—

A guard is as much a prisoner as those he keeps from freedom.

Michel, the tight-jawed president of the Black Student Caucus, who called her "little sister" and would have had potential if he'd remembered to sprinkle in some fun between bouts of righteous indignation.

How ironic it was that mortals, who had the least time of all, were willing to waste so much of it away from the people they love.

she was blanketed by sadness as deep as she'd felt the first months after her divorce.

He'd forgotten what it felt like to surrender to the comfort of tranquility.

I'm in the film business remember , and if this were a movie , this is the part where the audience would be screaming for the woman to get out of the house . So that's exactly what I'm doing .

All liberation is loneliness