When we work with love we renew the spirit; that renewal is an act of self-love, it nurtures our growth.

Shame produces trauma. Trauma produces paralysis.

The capacity to love is tied to being able to be awake, to being able to move out of yourself and be with someone else in a manner that is not about your desire to possess them, but to be with them, to be in union and communion.

It's in the act of having to do things that you don't want to that you learn something about moving past the self. Past the ego.

The fact is that it was bourgeois white feminism that I was reacting against when I stood in my first women's studies classes and said, "Black women have always worked."

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.

The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin.