“Night came walking through Egypt swishing her black dress.”

One finds great comfort in good dinners.

He was the average mortal. It troubled him to get used to the world one way and then suddenly have it turn different.

Anytime you catch folks lying, they scared of something!

It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it.

Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.

There is two things everybody got to find out for themselves. They got to find out about love and they got to find out about living.

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

It was funny if you looked at it right quick, but it got pitiful if you thought about it awhile.

The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor.

Grown people know that they do not always know the way of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof.

My head was full of misty fumes of doubt.

Those that don’t got it, can’t show it. Those that got it, can’t hide it.

I made up my mind to keep my feelings to myself since they did not seem to matter to anyone else but me.

Bitterness is the coward’s revenge on the world for having been hurt.

If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don’t keer if you die at dusk. It’s so many people never seen de light at all.

I will fight for my country, but I will not lie for her.

The burden of being black is that you have to be superior just to be equal. But the glory of it is that, once you achieve, you have achieved, indeed.

I am really enjoying the new Martin Luther King Jr stamp – just think about all those white bigots, licking the backside of a black man.

When we’re unemployed, we’re called lazy; when the whites are unemployed it’s called a depression.

Wearing a hijab never made me feel any more conservative – it made me feel safe. Then, after 9/11, I became the butt of a joke on the playground, so I stopped wearing it. Kids can be really cruel when you’re the only black girl in your Girl Scout troop.

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.