“The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”

I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance.

Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.

The rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged.

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

The people I love, I’m committed to loving for the rest of my life.

What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.

No black woman writer in this culture can write “too much”. Indeed, no woman writer can write “too much”. No woman has ever written enough.

You can only realize change if you live simply. Once people want enormous excess, you can hardly do social change.

To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.

There is no life to be found in violence. Every act of violence brings us closer to death.

Justice demands integrity. It’s to have a moral universe – not only know what is right or wrong but to put things in perspective, weigh things. Justice is different from violence and retribution; it requires complex accounting.

When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear, against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect, to find ourselves in the other.

To know love we have to invest time and commitment.

To know love we have to invest time and commitment.

Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope.

Honesty and openness is always the foundation of insightful dialogue.

As an ultimate objective, “peace” simply means communist world control.

The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses.

If I disappoint someone, it’s their loss for putting that expectation on me when they don’t know me. I can’t control what they want.

On the field, aggression can sometimes be a positive emotion. It boosts performance and can lift your game. But over the years, I have learnt that restrained aggression is a better animal. That way, you will conserve your energy and won’t spend yourself quickly.

If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves.

Trust is good, but control is better.

This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.

The man who has gotten everything he wants is all in favor of peace and order.