Angela Flournoy

"No outside pressure could live up to the pressure I’ve always put on myself as a writer…"

"Any realistic depiction of Detroit should include the blight and frustration that come with living there, but it should also show regular people experiencing joy."

"I don’t think I need to succeed so that the race can succeed. We’ve seen that. We’ve been succeeding since we were sneaking to learn how to read. We’ve been showing ourselves to be exceptional, and it doesn’t change anything. I understand that burden; I do not feel that burden. I feel the burden on the page when writing a story to do justice to the black people I am rendering, but I don’t necessarily believe that my successes or failure will have some greater impact on the way that people view black people…"

"Write about whatever random-ass black thing you want to write about. Or not. The only way that our literature will continue to grow is if we accept and acknowledge that nothing we write will change the hearts and minds of people who don’t want their hearts and minds changed…"

"Whether it's 'cause you move away or because your lives are just sort of diverging, you have to keep choosing to be a part of this friendship."

"I wanted to think about the beginnings and what it feels like to have a kind of rupture with someone you love, or you grew up loving, and for it to kind of just bloom into this insurmountable distance between the two of you."

"There's something universal about the experience of navigating middle life or into middle life, which is that there are just a lot fewer guideposts."

"You've got to navigate what might feel just completely opaque by yourself in a lot of ways. There are the sort of fellow travelers, but you have to decide what is it going to feel like? What is going to feel satisfactory to you? And that is what I think about when I think about the title, is these women are navigating the wilderness."

"These women, they don't just have deep emotional lives, but they are, you know, thinking about the world. They're thinking about art. They're thinking about things that are bigger than just reactions to circumstances."

"There is a reason for African Americans to feel a lot of pride. Detroiters faced a lot of obstacles related to home ownership, which was a cornerstone of the American dream, but they achieved it nonetheless."

"It’s important for African Americans to find sources of pride as society turns away from valuing us."

"There were safety issues, the City let the lights remain off in certain areas, and there were no services. I wondered, how did this happen? I was exploring what it feels like to know things are changing and shifting."