You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.

Black women have always been friends. I mean, if you didn't have each other you had nothing.

Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.

Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.

...black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female. It's not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don't write very differently from white men.

When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.

Let your face speak what's in your heart.