“Misery don’t call ahead. That’s why you have to stay awake – otherwise it just walks on in your door.”

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.

If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

Being able to laugh got me through.

And some men are as ignorant of what they do when awake as they are forgetful of what they do when asleep.

And some men are as ignorant of what they do when awake as they are forgetful of what they do when asleep.

The awake share a common world, but the asleep turn aside into private worlds.

When men dream, each has his own world. When they are awake, they have a common world.

I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.

I have left orders to be awakened at any time during national emergency, even if I’m in a cabinet meeting.

From childhood’s hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali.