“We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about survival and growth.”

Some women wait for themselves around the next corner and call the empty spot peace but the opposite of living is only not living and the stars do not care

The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.

I wish to raise a Black man who will recognize that the legitimate objects of his hostility are not women, but the particulars of a structure that programs him to fear and despise women as well as his own Black self.

My experience with people who tried to label me was that they usually did it to either dismiss me or use me.

There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.

Without community, there is no liberation.

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.

Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

Wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs.

We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.

Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.

You are the one that you are looking for.

I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.

Men and women balance each other out, and we have to get to a point where we are comfortable with appreciating each other.

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

Leaders are those who empower others.

I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.

You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.

Secretly we’re all a little more absurd than we make ourselves out to be.