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

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

Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.

You'd better name yourself, because, if you don't others will do it for you.

Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.

I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees.

Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.