If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

Isolation, you know, carries the seeds of its own destruction because as times change, other things seep in.

Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves. Very much so. They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed.

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

I don't wait to be struck by lightning and I don't need certain slants of light in order to be able to write.

Two parents can't raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community - everybody - to raise a child. And the little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. It doesn't work for white people or for black people. Why are we hanging onto it, I don't know. It isolates people into little units - people need a larger unit.

Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.