“Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.”

If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.

There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.

The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.

Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.

True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one’s life.

Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

Literature is indispensable to the world.

It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.

If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.

Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

It doesn’t matter what blood or race or creed or color. Love is love and it breaks all boundaries and you just see it right away.

It’s a struggle but that’s why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.

There are not more than five primary colours, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

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

I could never pretend something I didn’t feel. I could never make love if I didn’t love, and if I loved I could no more hide the fact than change the color of my eyes.

May we continue to remember not to judge man by the color of his skin, but the content of his character.

Whatever anyone does or says, I must be emerald and keep my colour.