I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't.

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

Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.

I became more courageous by doing the very things I needed to be courageous for-first, a little, and badly. Then, bit by bit, more and better. Being avidly-sometimes annoy-ingly-curious and persistent about discovering how others were doing what I wanted to do.

... poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.

I cannot shut you out the way I shut the others out, so maybe I can destroy you. Must destroy you?