“Death is with you all the time; you get deeper in it as you move towards it, but it’s not unfamiliar to you. It’s always been there, so what becomes unfamiliar to you when you pass away from the moment is really life.”

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.

You can only realize change if you live simply. Once people want enormous excess, you can hardly do social change.

To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.

There is no life to be found in violence. Every act of violence brings us closer to death.

Justice demands integrity. It’s to have a moral universe – not only know what is right or wrong but to put things in perspective, weigh things. Justice is different from violence and retribution; it requires complex accounting.

When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear, against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect, to find ourselves in the other.

To know love we have to invest time and commitment.

To know love we have to invest time and commitment.

Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope.

Honesty and openness is always the foundation of insightful dialogue.

Every terrorist regime in the world uses isolation to break people’s spirits.

Death may beget life, but oppression can beget nothing other than itself.

When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.

Coroner’s inquest: death by drowning. And he hasn’t been to the seashore in ten years.

Blessed is the covenant of love, the covenant of mercy, useless light behind the terror, deathless song in the house of night.

Death is never dangerous. Once death happens, all danger ceases.

The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living.

If the truth shall kill them, let them die.

Death is the easiest of all things after it, and the hardest of all things before it.