“To get to a place where you could love anything you chose – not to need permission for desire – well now that was freedom.”

In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent. This is precisely the time when artists go to work.

Something that is loved is never lost.

You don’t have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.

Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.

I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.

Navigating a white male world was not threatening. It wasn’t even interesting. I was more interesting than they were.

Love is never any better than the lover.

You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.

You are your best thing.

I didn’t want to speak for black people. I wanted to speak to and to be among. It’s us.

I’ve spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

Self love is the highest form of love and the hardest. Choose you.

Have I known it was going to end this way; I would’ve kept some love for myself, & chose me over you.

I offer no explanations on how i choose to repair what you broke.

The only reason you aren’t changing your life is that you choose to tell yourself excuses.

Self-love is choosing to choose yourself over anyone else.

Your mistakes don’t define you, what you choose to do to fix them does.

Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.

Accept – then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.