We need everybody and all that we are. We need to know and make known the complete, constantly unfolding, complicated heritage that is our black experience. We should absolutely resist the superstar, one at a time mentality that threatens the varied and resilient, flexible wealth of our Black future.

My heart is not peripheral to me.

Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine.

If any of us hopes to survive, she must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and political response. The thoroughly destructive and indefensible subjugation of the majority of Americans cannot continue except at the peril of the entire body politic.

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name

The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet

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.