Yearning is the word that best describes a common psychological state shared by many of us, cutting across boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexual practice.
Few people who are hit once by someone they love respond in the way they might to a singular physical assault by a stranger.
I think the Women’s movement has had a major impact on everybody’s lives in our nation and in the world as a whole.
I feel that my environment reflects my belief in the grace and art and elegance of living simply.
I’m so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer.
We judge on the basis of what somebody looks like, skin color, whether we think they’re beautiful or not. That space on the Internet allows you to converse with somebody with none of those things involved.
Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.
I think Black people need to take self-esteem seriously.
Since loving is about knowing, we have more meaningful love relationships when we know each other and it takes time to know each other.
Death is with you all the time; you get deeper in it as you move towards it, but it’s not unfamiliar to you. It’s always been there, so what becomes unfamiliar to you when you pass away from the moment is really life.
It is a distortion of the notion of romantic love to want to see obedience as the quintessential expression of respect.
I get so tired of people acting like, you know, black men and women never help each other, never support each other.
I think I was always obsessed with esthetics.
I’m such a girl for the living room. I really like to stay in my nest and not move. I travel in my mind, and that that’s a rigorous state of journeying for me. My body isn’t that interested in moving from place to place.
I think the number one thing Black women and all Black people should be paying attention to is our health.
To live fixated on the future is to engage in psychological denial. It is a form of psychic violence that prepares us to accept the violence needed to ensure the maintenance of imperialist, future-oriented society.
The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech.
Abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively.
Lying has become so much the accepted norm that people lie even when it would be simpler to tell the truth.
Stereotypes abound when there is distance. They are an invention, a pretense that one knows when the steps that would make real knowing possible cannot be taken or are not allowed.