“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.”

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.

In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair.

I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk throught the rain.

Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity.

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

Out of my flesh that hungers and my mouth that knows comes the shape I am seeking for reason.

The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation .

In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.

I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.

We recognize that all knowledge is mediated through the body and that feeling is a profound source of information about our lives.

The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

You must accept the fact that there is no help but self-help. I cannot tell you how to gain freedom since freedom exists within you.

Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.

The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept.

Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.

You must accept the reality of other people.