It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.

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.

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

Lonely, ain't it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.

I get angry about things, then go on and work.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

I don't think I knew any of my father's friends - male friends - by their real names. I remember them only by their nicknames.