The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.

Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

Well, I do not want to be tolerated, nor misnamed. I want to be recognized.

As a Black lesbian feminist comfortable with the many different ingredients of my identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual freedom from oppression, I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self. But this is a destructive and fragmenting way to live.

When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn't matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.

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

For we have built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression and these must be altered at the same time that we alter the living condition which are the result of those structures. For the master's tool will never dismantle the master's house.