And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.

… our sons must become men – such men as we hope our daughters, born and unborn, will be pleased to live among. Our sons will not grow into women. Their way is more difficult than that of our daughters, for they must move away from us, without us. Hopefully ours have what they have learned from us, and a howness to forge into their own image.

If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest.

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.

I learned to read from Mrs. Augusta Baker, the children's librarian. ... If that was the only good deed that lady ever did in her life, may she rest in peace. Because that deed saved my life, if not sooner, then later, when sometimes the only thing I had to hold on to was knowing I could read.

stoicism and silence does not serve us nor our communities, only the forces of things as they are.