Women are powerful and dangerous.

Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.

When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I'm not excluding you from the joining - I'm broadening the joining.

We must wake up knowing we have work to do and go to bed knowing we've done it.

The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.

I learned to read from Mrs. Augusta Baker, the children's librarian. ... If that was the only good deed that lady ever did in her life, may she rest in peace. Because that deed saved my life, if not sooner, then later, when sometimes the only thing I had to hold on to was knowing I could read.