Always in the black spirituals there's that promise that things are going to be better, by and by.

I've learned that making a 'living' is not the same thing as 'making a life'.

You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I'll rise!

We are loved by Love itself. There is nothing good that we can't do.

Then the question began to live under my blankets: How did lesbianism begin? What were the symptoms? The public library gave information on the finished lesbian--and that woefully sketchy--but on the growth of a lesbian, there was nothing. I did discover that the difference between hermaphrodites and lesbians was that hermaphrodites were "born that way." It was impossible to determine whether lesbians budded gradually, or burst into being with a suddenness that dismayed them as much as it repelled society.

A wise woman wishes to be no one's enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone's victim.

I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition.