Our society allows people to be absolutely neurotic and totally out of touch with their feelings and everyone else's feelings, and yet be very respectable.

I write for young girls of color, for girls who don’t even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive. I can only change how they live, not how they think.

nice is such a rip-off.

Being alive and being a woman is all I got, but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't conquered yet.

i found god in myself and i loved her i loved her fiercely

The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.

our dreams draw blood from old sores.