The thing about genius is it will never yield to circumstances. Genius regards what's given as the beginning of its need to find or devise something else.

Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.

Lately... Americans have begun to understand that trouble does not start somewhere on the other side of town. It seems to originate inside the absolute middle of the homemade cherry pie. In our history, the state has failed to respond to the weak. You could be white, male, Presbyterian and heterosexual besides, but if you get fired or if you get sick tomorrow, you might as well be Black, for all the state will want to hear from you.

It means to educate myself incessantly about the world around me.

Maybe the purpose of being here, wherever we are, is to increase the durability and occasions of love among and between peoples.

To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.

Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires.