“It was a fine cry – loud and long – but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.

Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn’t have each other you had nothing.

The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.

When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things.

Racism will disappear when it’s no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it’ll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.

He can’t value you more than you value yourself.

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

Liberation means you don’t have to be silenced.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

Perhaps that’s what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

I dream a dream that dreams back at me.

Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.

In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.

We are all sharks circling, and waiting, for traces of blood to appear in the water.

There is an imaginary circle drawn around every human being, over which no government should be able to step.

There is a subset of Democrats who tend to mis-fill out ballots. The way you mark the ballot is like an S.A.T. – you fill in the circle. And the subset of people who tend to, like, put a check there instead, or an X, or fill it out wrong.

I don’t know if I’ve ever been in a clique.

I was right at the edge of their circle, like the tail of a Q…

I think of art as coming from daily life, daily experience. I think it’s very important not to have it become work for some kind of elite circle.