Knowing love or the hope of knowing love is the anchor that keeps us from falling into that sea of despair.

Honesty and openness is always the foundation of insightful dialogue.

Readers forget that one can critique yet still admire.

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."

Few people who are hit once by someone they love respond in the way they might to a singular physical assault by a stranger.

In order for me to engage in a revolutionary struggle for collective Black self-determination, I have to engage feminism because that becomes the vehicle by which I project myself as a female into the heart of the struggle, but the heart of the struggle does not begin with feminism. It begins with an understanding of domination and with a critique of domination in all its forms.

If we are ever to construct a feminist movement that is not based on the premise that men and women are always at war with one another, then we must be willing to acknowledge the appropriateness of complex critical responses to writing by men even if it is sexist. Clearly women can learn from writers whose work is sexist, even be inspired by it, because sexism may be simply one dimension of that work. Concurrently fiercely critiquing the sexism does not mean that one does not value the work.