Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded..

My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those….

Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless..

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge. They are chaotic, sometimes painful, sometimes contradictory, but they come from deep within u….

what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority.

We are all in the process of becoming..

Raising Black children-female and male-in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at th….

What do we want from each other after we have told our stories.

... it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence..

It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity ….

Pain is an event ... Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain..

I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing a….

As we come to know, accept, and explore our feelings, they will become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and darin….

What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of d….

Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is t….

We must wake up knowing we have work to do and go to bed knowing we've done it..

Some words live in my throat breeding like adders. Others know sun seeking like gypsies over my tongue to explode through my lips.

Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it..

Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic..

I believe one of the hardest things you can do is conquer your fears, but if you have a goal, then it's your job to open up and let it be real no mat….

Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men..