I am on the cusp of change and the curve is shifting fast.

Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away.

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

[Speaking] is never without fear; of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now, that if I were to have been born mute, and had maintained an oath of silence my whole life for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die.

Silence has never brought us anything of worth.

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

And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.