“You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.”

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

We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.

You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.

Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

All important things are hard.

Black people’s music is in a class by itself and always has been.

I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can’t teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.

From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.

The function of freedom is to free someone else.

A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves – a special kind of double.

It was a fine cry – loud and long – but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies.

What a woman. What a life.

The greatest respect is owed to a child.

A lot of my mistakes, are birthed by curiosity. Like a child, drawn to fire; I came for the light and found pain instead.

It’s wrong for parents to bury their children. It should be the other way around.

Always end the name of your child with a vowel, so that when you yell the name will carry.

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.

What greater aspiration and challenge are there for a mother than the hope of raising a great son or daughter?

Every door of racial prejudice I can kick down, is one less door that my children have to kick down.

I tried to allow my children to take risks, to test themselves. Better broken bones than broken spirit.