Women manage, quite brilliantly, on the whole, and to stunning and unforeseeable effect, to survive and surmount being defined by others. They dismiss the definition, however dangerous or wounding it may be-- or even, sometimes, find a way to utilize it.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.

... every human being is an unprecedented miracle.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.