“The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.”

You don’t have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.

Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.

I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.

Navigating a white male world was not threatening. It wasn’t even interesting. I was more interesting than they were.

Love is never any better than the lover.

You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.

You are your best thing.

I didn’t want to speak for black people. I wanted to speak to and to be among. It’s us.

I’ve spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

Lonely was much better than alone.

Anything dead coming back to life hurts.

When you first get married, they open the car door for you. Eighteen years now…once he opened the car door for me in the last four years – we were on the freeway at the time.

For me, I’m in the driver’s seat; I’m No. 1 in the world. I’ve won the last couple of meetings, and I’ve won the big tournaments lately. Whoever comes, I’ll try to beat him. But it’s almost up to me to decide who’s my rival, isn’t it?

Maybe further down the road in my career, in a couple of years when I’m maybe not that fast any more around the court, then maybe it would be good to come to the net a little bit more often.

A couple of times a day I sit quietly and visualize my body fighting the AIDS virus. It’s the same as me sitting and seeing myself hit the perfect serve. I did that often when I was an athlete.

Watching a movie a couple of weeks ago. An American movie. I can’t remember the name, but it wasn’t even a sad movie. It caught me off guard. I was on an airplane.

Most people assume that women are responsible for households and child care. Most couples operate that way – not all. That fundamental assumption holds women back.

My goal in a couple of years is to try to build a successful fashion house like Armani or Versace. I want that more than anything.

When woman work outside the home and share breadwinning duties, couples are more likely to stay together. In fact, the risk of divorce reduces by about half when a wife earns half the income and a husband does half the housework.