When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.

Now when you hates you shrinks up inside and gets littler and you squeezes your heart tight and you stays so mad with peoples you feels sick all the time like you needs the doctor.

Racism is so extreme and so pervasive in our American society that no black individual lives in an atmosphere of freedom.

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth.

I want my careless song to strike no minor key; no fiend to stand between my body's Southern song - the fusion of the South, my body's song and me.

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.

Only ways you can keep folks hating is to keep them apart and separated from each other.