“Life for my child is simple, and is good.”

Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.

The music is in minors.

No man can give me any word but Wait.

We don’t ask a flower any special reason for its existence. We just look at it and are able to accept it as being something different from ourselves.

When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water.

When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you’re telling them that they’re less than somebody else.

I believe we should all know each other, we human carriers of so many pleasurable differences. To not know is to doubt, to shrink from, sidestep or destroy.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.

Don’t let anyone call you a minority if you’re black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You’re not less than anybody else.

What I’m fighting for now in my work… for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.

The poetry is myself.

The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the ’60s: Independent fire!

We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.

And if sun comes how shall we greet him? shall we not dread him, shall we not fear him after so lengthy a session with shade?

This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.

I want to be open to the kids who only speak Spanish, the kids who speak only Spanglish, and the kids who don’t even speak Spanish at all.

Continue to speak out against all forms of injustice to yourselves and others, and you will set a mighty example for your children and for future generations.

The only time a woman really succeeds in changing a man is when he is a baby.

Each child should be more intelligent than his parents.

In intimate family life, there comes a moment when children, willingly or no, become the judges of their parents.

The greatest violence is seeing a child go to bed hungry.

Spring appears and we are once more children.

Arts can save children, no matter what’s going on in their homes.