“The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.”

I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.

I define “politics” as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create – not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.

To do something very common, in my own way.

Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.

We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.

How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.

he ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves.

No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.

If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.

The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from “Transcendental Etude

To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.

The marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.

We lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo’s Women’s War.

Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work.

When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart.

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.

I wanted people to feel me as a person. I do this music for the people, man, so at the end of the day I feel like, [given] our state of mind and the state our economy is in

You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.

At the day of Doom men shall be judged according to their fruits. It will not be said then, did you believe? But, were you doers or talkers only?

He who runs from God in the morning will scarcely find Him the rest of the day.

I went to my friend’s house one day, and he had an electric guitar he had just bought with a tiny little amp

The day of fortune is like a harvest day, We must be busy when the corn is ripe.

The reason why the Christians in this day are at such a loss as to some things is that they are contented with what comes from man’s mouth, without searching and kneeling before God to know of Him the truth of things.

Kids win this’n’that every day. Thousands of them. One out of a hundred fights professionally. One out of a thousand’s worth watchin’, one out of a million’s worth coffee and doughnuts.