“Then black despair, The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone.”

I love all waste And solitary places; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.

Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear.

Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.

When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindu, his best friends hear no more of him.

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

This lake exceeds anything I ever beheld in beauty.

Are we not formed, as notes of music are, For one another, though dissimilar?

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.

Worse than a bloody hand is a hard heart.

I love tranquil solitude.

Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of its transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle.

Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips.

We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change? To these All things are subject but eternal love.

I wish no living thing to suffer pain.

Since stepping reluctantly into public life, I’ve been held up as the most powerful woman in the world and taken down as an angry black woman. I’ve wanted to ask my detractors which part of that phrase matters to them the most—is it angry or black or woman ?

It isn’t a matter of black is beautiful as much as it is white is not all that’s beautiful.

I was’nt always black. There was this freckel that just grew and grew.

The realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know.

It’s remarkable how a stereotype functions as an actual trap. How many angry black women have been caught in the circular logic of that phrase? When you aren’t being listened to, why wouldn’t you get louder? If you’re written off as angry or emotional, doesn’t that just cause more of the same?

I’m not black, but there’s a whole lot of times I wish I could say I’m not white.

Be Black, buy Black, think Black, and all else will take care of itself.

I have no desire to take all black people back to Africa; there are blacks who are no good here and will likewise be no good there.