Women have endeavored to guide men to love because patriarchal thinking has sanctioned this work even as it has undermined it by teaching men to refuse guidance...A useful gift all love's practitioners can give is the offering of forgiveness. It not only allows us to move away from blame, from seeing others as the cause of our sustained lovelessness, but it enables us to experience agency, to know we can be responsible for giving and finding love.

. . .there is an element of Play that is almost ritualistic in Black folk life. It serves to mediate the tensions, stress, and pain of constant exploitation and oppression.

Writing and the hope of writing pulls me back from the edges of despair. I believe insanity and despair are at times one and the same.

You must have courage to love, you have to have a profound will to do what is right to love, and it does not come easy.

I have been contemplating the place and meaning of love in our lives and culture for years. When a subject attracts my intellectual and emotional imagination, I am long to observe it from all angles, to know it inside and out.

Black males who refuse categorization are rare, for the price of visibility in the contemporary world of white supremacy is that black identity be defined in relation to the stereotype whether by embodying it or seeking to be other than it…Negative stereotypes about the nature of black masculinity continue to overdetermine the identities black males are allowed to fashion for themselves.

When angels speak of love they tell us it is only by loving that we enter an earthly paradise. They tell us paradise is our home and love our true destiny.