I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.

I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.

There are no honest poems about dead women.

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

In other words, I would be giving in to a myth of sameness which I think can destroy us.

Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.

For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.