We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name.
We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.
I do believe that the analogy for bisexuality is a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multiracial world view. Bisexuality follows from such a perspective and leads to it, as well.
As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words.
In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.
There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.
Let me just say, at once: I am not now nor have I ever been a white man. And, leaving aside the joys of unearned privilege, this leaves me feeling pretty good...
If we lived in a democratic state our language would have to hurtle, fly, curse, and sing, in all the common American names, all the undeniable and representative and participating voices of everybody here.
Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn’t that what freedom implies?
Overall, white men run America. From nuclear armaments to the filth and jeopardy of New York City subways to the cruel mismanagement of health care, is there anything to boast about?
I am a stranger, learning to love the strangers around me.
I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.
To tell the truth is to become beautiful.
And who will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea: we are the ones we have been waiting for.
Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine.
Americans have begun to understand that trouble does not start somewhere on the other side of town. It seems to originate inside the absolute middle of the homemade cherry pie.
As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth – whatever the truth may be – that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.
As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language.