“Black people’s music is in a class by itself and always has been.”

There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

I get angry about things, then go on and work.

When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.

You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.

You are your own stories.

I don’t think one parent can raise a child. I don’t think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village.

But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.

He wants to put his story next to hers.

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race – scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct, it has a social function, racism.

Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.

Misery don’t call ahead. That’s why you have to stay awake – otherwise it just walks on in your door.

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.

I need beaches, and blackness, and moonlit nakedness.

I’m the little half-black, half-Jewish girl who was odd and awkward. I try to be myself.

Only the foolish, blinded by language’s conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it’s melancholy rim, green in it’s envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it’s greatest rages, black.

Which is probably the reason why I work exclusively in black and white to highlight that contrast.

What seems to me white, I will believe black if the hierarchical Church so defines.

I do remember being teased by my cousins on my mom’s side for not being black enough. And then I’d spend the summer with my dad and be sent to all white summer camps where I was ‘that black girl.’

I’ve changed the way I look a bit but not intentionally. I’ve cut my hair. I’ve got a bit of pink in it and lately I’ve become a bit monochrome, wearing a lot of black and white.

Blue green orange red. I could eat all the colors of the rainbow and still see life in black-and-white reruns I’ve watched a thousand times. – rumination.