“When we speak, we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.”
“Your silence will not protect you.”
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
“I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”
“Without community, there is no liberation.”
“Life is very short, and what we have to do must be done in the now.”
“Revolution is not a one-time event.”
“If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
“The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them.”
“Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”
“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”
“Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.”
“We must wake up knowing we have work to do and go to bed knowing we’ve done it.”
“I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.”
“Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.”
“For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call America, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson: that we were never meant to survive.”
“The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.”
“Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.”
“Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.”
“We are powerful because we have survived.”
“Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action.”
“I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting in the ways I was born to act, and that is in the context of my life as a whole.”
“Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.”
“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives.”
“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
“Art is not living. It is the use of living.”
“Black writers of whatever quality will be in their own eyes always ‘too Black’ or ‘not Black enough.'”
“In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.”
“There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.”
“When we learn to face our fears, they no longer control us.”
“The strongest actions for a woman are to love herself, be herself, and shine amongst those who never believed she could.”
“I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified.”
“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”
“Survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular, and sometimes reviled.”
“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say?”
“The world is full of unfinished stories.”
“I am a black feminist. I mean I recognize that my power, as well as my primary oppressions, come as a result of my blackness as well as my womaness.”
“There are so many silences to be broken.”
“Those of us who stand outside the circle of society’s definition of acceptable women must constantly assert our differences.”
“Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.”
“Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle where we are standing.”
“We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads.”
“As we come to understand our humanity, we will come to know each other and to recognize each other’s hopes and aspirations.”
“The joy that lies in another’s growth, whether that be my child or my friend, is to me the height of experience.”
“Our visions begin with our desires.”
“Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me.”
“To come together and recognize the power of our differences is an act of resistance.”
“The work of each generation is to find its own voice.”