When I die, I will no be guilty of having left a generation of girls behind thinking that anyone can tend to their emotional health other than themselves.

I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.

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

I am gonna write poems til i die and when i have gotten outta this body i am gonna hang round in the wind and knock over everybody who got their feet on the ground.

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.

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

Right now being born a girl is to be born threatened.