“Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”

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.

Lonely was much better than alone.

I type in one place, but I write all over the house.

There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.

My musical taste and image is going to change naturally. It’s not forced; I do what comes natural to me.

You can’t stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.

It’s always good to come back home.

It’s always good to come back home.

Learning is hard. Unlearning is harder. Pretending that most of us don’t need to do either when it comes to racism is its own form of violence.

Today there are opportunities that no one knows if they will come round again in the future.

I love you now for what we’ve already shared, and I love you now in anticipation of all that’s to come.

I have fun like a child in the street. When the day comes when I’m not enjoying it, I will leave football.