“Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know nothin’ but what we see.”

An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.

Love is like the sea. It’s a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.

There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man’s spice-box seasons his own food.

So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day.

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.

I don’t know any more about the future than you do. I hope that it will be full of work, because I have come to know by experience that work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find. I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death.

I love myself when I am laughing. And then again when I am looking mean and impressive.

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.

The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.

Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

Love, I find, is like singing.

She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen.

When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.

There is nothing to make you like other human beings so much as doing things for them.

If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding.

She starched and ironed her face, forming it into just what people wanted to see.

My mom is a yoga instructor: 100% black with dreadlocks.

That Justice is a blind goddess Is a thing to which we black are wise: Her bandage hides two festering sores That once perhaps were eyes.

Nothing is ever black and white but I’m sick and tired of all the grey area.

I think every group of black guys should have at least one white guy in it.

Optimist – A proponent of the doctrine that black is white.

To describe something as being black and white means it is clearly defined. Yet when your ethnicity is black and white, the dichotomy is not that clear. In fact, it creates a grey area.

I grew up in L.A. in a school that was diverse, but it was not really integrated, so I didn’t ever fully fit in with the black girls or the white girls or the Latina girls.

You go to school, you study about the Germans and the French, but not about your own race. I hope the time will come when you study black history too.