“We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present.”

Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.

Some women wait for themselves around the next corner and call the empty spot peace but the opposite of living is only not living and the stars do not care

The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.

I wish to raise a Black man who will recognize that the legitimate objects of his hostility are not women, but the particulars of a structure that programs him to fear and despise women as well as his own Black self.

My experience with people who tried to label me was that they usually did it to either dismiss me or use me.

There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.

Without community, there is no liberation.

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.

Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

Wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs.

We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.

Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.

You are the one that you are looking for.

There’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.

The cocktail filled him with a whirling exhilaration behind which he was aware of devastating desires-to rush places in fast motors, to kiss girls, to sing, to be witty. … He perceived that he had gifts of profligacy which had been neglected. -chapter 8

A speculator is one who runs risks of which he is aware and an investor is one who runs risks of which he is unaware.

I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me,

You don’t want to hear about how much money I donate to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America or to AIDS awareness or to give out scholarships. You don’t want to hear about that.

The problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.

I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality, I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say in paint.

As a broadly left-wing, environmentally aware urban believer in anthropogenic global warming, I am all for a total ban on motor vehicles.