The good news may be that Nature is phasing out the white man, but the bad news is that's who She thinks we all are.

My writing is very organic. It's what I am. My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig. So I think of it as something that's very essential to my being.

I love us so incredibly, insanely deeply; it's almost unbearable to see what we do to ourselves.

The Olinka girls do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother why she thought this, she said: A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something. What can she become? I asked. Why, she said, the mother of his children. But I am not the mother of anybody's children, I said, and I am something.

It must become a right of every person to die of old age. And if we secure this right for ourselves, we can, coincidentally, assure it for the planet.

I just like to have words that describe things correctly. Now to me, 'black feminist' does not do that. I need a word that is organic, that really comes out of the culture, that really expresses the spirit that we see in black women. And it's just... womanish.

I feel that the ancestors are that covering that will cover me. I feel like I can only be enveloped in them spiritually and physically.