Every Black woman in America lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers.

Self-care is not about self-indulgence , it is about self-preservati on.

If you don’t define yourself for yourself then you will be crushed into other's fantasies of you and eaten alive

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 the same time, they will probably not survive. And in order to survive they must let go. This is what mothers teach — love, survival — that is, self-definition and letting go.

African tradition deals with life as an experience to be lived. In many respects, it is much like the Eastern philosophies in that we see ourselves as a part of a life force; we are joined, for instance, to the air, to the earth. We are part of the whole-life process. We live in accordance with, in a kind of correspondence with the rest of the world as a whole. And therefore living becomes an experience, rather than a problem, no matter how bad or how painful it may be.

The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations that we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us.

The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those boundaries.