As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language.

My heart is not peripheral to me.

If we even tolerate any oppression of gay and lesbian Americans, if we join those who would intrude upon the choices of our hearts, then who among us shall be free?

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.

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.

My father was both the person who gave me reason to learn how to fight and the one who taught me the basics of fighting. He would tell me that if it was a big fight, it would probably be uneven, it wouldn't be fair

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.