“The Black homosexual is hard pressed to gain audience among his heterosexual brothers; even if he is more talented, he is inhibited by his silence or his admissions. This is what the race has depended on in being able to erase homosexuality from our recorded history. The "chosen" history. But the sacred constructions of silence are futile exercises in denial. We will not go away with our issues of sexuality. We are coming home. It is not enough to tell us that one was a brilliant poet, scientist, educator, or rebel. Whom did he love? It makes a difference. I can't become a whole man simply on what is fed to me: watered-down versions of Black life in America. I need the ass-splitting truth to be told, so I will have something pure to emulate, a reason to remain loyal.”

“The point of my books is to give voice to otherwise voiceless females from history and myth, to unlock what has been secreted away in women's hearts and minds for millennia. Historically, women have either been reduced to nothing but their sexuality or stripped of it entirely: the Madonna or the whore.”

“Despite our differences, we did have a history. No one understood where I was coming from the way he did.”

“The man who has known pure joy, if only for a moment ... is the only man for whom affliction is something devastating. At the same time he is the only man who has not deserved the punishment. But, after all, for him it is no punishment; it is God holding his hand and pressing rather hard. For, if he remains constant, what he will discover buried deep under the sound of his own lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God.”

“We drive in silence until I need an answer, "What did he say to you at the elevator?" I look straight ahead when I ask."He thanked me for being there for you, even as a boy, when he could not protect you himself. He told me that I had his permission to love you.”

“Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest - the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways - and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world's longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in - to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them - neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them - and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.(pg. 27, "A Native Hill")”

“...the world we learned as children to fear---the milieu of goblins, ghosts, spirits, and magic - when it is the tangible world that is rife with unimaginable horrors. The truth is, we must fear monsters less and be warier of our own kind.-from Dracula In Love”