“If you do not know what you feel, then it is difficult to choose love; it is better to fall. Then you do not have to be responsible for your actions.”

Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.

I think life experiences are different for people who know what they want as children.

Living simply makes loving simple.

Feminism is for everybody.

Forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?

Whenever women struggle with breast cancer and face better care than ever, that’s feminism.

The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech.

Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power – not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.

One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library.

I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance.

Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.

The rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged.

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

The people I love, I’m committed to loving for the rest of my life.

What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.

No black woman writer in this culture can write “too much”. Indeed, no woman writer can write “too much”. No woman has ever written enough.

We are free when our actions emanate from our total personality, when they express it, when they resemble it in the indefinable way a work of art sometimes does the artist.

Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.

An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed in retaliation.

Action for which I become responsible, or for which my administration becomes responsible, shall be within the law.

Men often do things for women that they don’t want to do, so that women will do things for men that they don’t want to do.

The greatness of a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members.

You can’t get blase about something you haven’t done yet.

A fault which humbles a person is of more use to him or her than a good action which puffs him or her up.