Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.

The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.

I cannot shut you out the way I shut the others out, so maybe I can destroy you. Must destroy you?

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.

You cannot use someone else's fire. You can only use your own. And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it.

The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation.

Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged... We have been taught to either ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression... Survival is learning to take our difference and make them strengths.