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

I am still learning – how to take joy in all the people I am, how to use all my selves in the service of what I believe, how to accept when I fail and rejoice when I succeed.

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.

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.