[White folks] is the reason fences was invented. I mean, take before they come here with all they bibles, do you think the Injuns had done hogged propity from one another? No ma'am, they hadn't. They didn't mind letting folks use the grass and the good earth like the lawd intended it should be. Those people over there, you give 'em a chance, they try to take our land, never mind it belong to us. They been that was since hist'ry.

Grange zu Ruth, in: Alice Walker, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970)

She supposed the young men of Link's generation couldn't have manners like Mr. Powther's, though she didn't know why. Wars and atom bombs and the fact that there was so much hate in the world might have something to do with it.

Ann Petry, The Narrows (1953)

Ein fairer Preis, aber kein männlicher Preis. Fairness macht einen Mann nicht stolz. Bringt Fairness Erfolg? Bringt sie einem den Neid der Männer und die Liebe der Frauen? Nein, Sir, nein. Fairness ist was für Jungen und Junggesellen.

William Nicholson, Das Lied des Feuers (2002)

A daughter is a woman that cares about where she come from and takes care of them that took care of her.

Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (1981)

That was the sole lesson of their world: How to make waste, how top make machines that made more waste, how to make wasteful products, how to talk waste, how to study waste, how to design waste, how to cure people who were sickened by waste so they could be well enough to endure it, how to mobilize waste, legalize waste and how to sepise the culture that lived in cloth houses and shit on the ground far away from where they ate. And it would drown them one day, they would all sink into their own waste and the waste they had made of the world and then, finally they would know true peace and the happiness they had been looking for all along.

Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (1981)

Each man would have to free himself, he thought, and the best way he could.

Grange Copeland, in: Alice Walker, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970)

Two-heading was dying out, he lamented. Folks what can look at things in more than one way is done got rare.

Grange Copeland, in: Alice Walker, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970)