Birth, life, and death― each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.

I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.

I am in the position of judging people by the best they've ever done rather than the worst.

And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man.

My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.

They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds― cooled ―and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.