Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.
Women are powerful and dangerous.
When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.
For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it.
The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those boundaries.
I was going to die, if not sooner, then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.
Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.
Silence has never brought us anything of worth.
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change.
I am very, very happy for Alice Walker.
To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society.
I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees.
Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.
My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I’m going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity.
Say what you have to say now! Don’t wait until you’re sending blips from the other side.
So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive.
What do we want from each other after we have told our stories.
For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection, which is so feared by a patriarchal world...
Hopefully, we can learn from the 60s that we cannot afford to do our enemies work by destroying each other.
And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.