“But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.”

One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness.

Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.

Oppression is as American as apple pie.

I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.

Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.

Our visions begin with our desires.

Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action.

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.

Women are powerful and dangerous.

What you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority.

Some problems we share as women, some we do not.

I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do.

I wish to raise a Black man who will not be destroyed by, nor settle for, those corruptions called power by the white fathers who mean his destruction as surely as they mean mine.

It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.

There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.

I am bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.

I have always felt that humor was a wonderful vehicle to let us become connected with each other and ourselves; I try to portray the similarities and polarities in men and women, so that we can acknowledge and embrace our collective consciousness.

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as a derivative of consciousness.

All sentiment is right; because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it.

Do not look for approval except for the consciousness of doing your best.

Sex and sleep alone make me conscious that I am mortal

Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness.

Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, there is awareness.