One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness.

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.

My fear of anger taught me nothing.

I am very, very happy for Alice Walker.

. . . it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are-until the poem-nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.

I am a Black Feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my blackness as well as my womaness, and therefore my struggles on both of these fronts are inseparable.

Art is not living. It is the use of living. The artist has the ability to take the living and use it in a certain way and produce art.