Survival is an art. It requires the dulling of the mind and the senses, and a delicate attunement to waiting, without insisting on precision about just what it is you are waiting for.

Survival is an art. It requires the dulling of the mind and the senses, and a delicate attunement to waiting, without insisting on precision about just what it is you are waiting for.

For men to focus on controlling women's reproduction to solve a society's problems seems nothing short of mad or, at best, superstitious. But men's superstition or insanity has real and dire consequences for the women who are its object. And states, too, home in on women's bodies, perhaps to create the illusion that men are in control of uncontrollable forces. Indeed, almost all governments try to control women's bodies and regulate their appearance in some way.

Desire consumes you, it takes you over. You forget yourself completely. All you can think about is the other, the one you desire, your self is just a fire.

My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don’t even need to shrug. I simply don’t care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don’t matter.

When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That's progress?

I'd discovered you never know yourself until you're tested and that you don't even know you're being tested until afterwards, and that in fact there isn't anyone giving the test except yourself.