“Something that is loved is never lost.”

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.

A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.

In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent. This is precisely the time when artists go to work.

You don’t have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.

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.

The sharp thorn often produces delicate roses.

There can be no really pervasive system of oppression, such as that in the United States, without the consent of the oppressed.

Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.

I never learned hate at home, or shame. I had to go to school for that.

I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.

I used to envy the sun, for having seen it all. I was wrong. Left with nothing to see, how bored she must be.

Doubts are powerful. They, not only demand we look again, they tell us what to see.

Doing good and being good; are two different things. The first is a shirt we put on, take off. The latter is our skin.