Love recognizes no barriers.
Every experience shapes your writing, being stuck in a car on a lonely bridge, or dancing at a prom, being the it girl on the beach, all of those things influence your life, they influence how you write, and the topics you choose to write about.
Beneath the skin, beyond the differing features and into the true heart of being, fundamentally, we are more alike, my friend, than we are unalike.
We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings.
You forgive yourself for every failure because you are trying to do the right thing. God knows that and you know it. Nobody else may know it.
Look what you’ve already come through! Don’t deny it. Say I’m stronger than I thought I was.
Still, when it looked like the sun wasn’t going to shine anymore, God put a rainbow in the clouds.
There is a kind of strength that is almost frightening in Black women. It’s as if a steel rod runs right through the head down to the feet.
A mother’s love liberates.
We really are 15 countries, and it’s remarkable that each of us thinks we represent the real America. The Midwesterner in Kansas, the black American in Durham – both are certain they are the real American.
Every journey begins with a single step.
When we cast our bread upon the waters we can presume that someone downstream whose face we will never know will benefit from our action, as we who are downstream from another will profit from the grantor’s gift.
Continue to be bold, courageous. Try to choose the wisest thing and once you’ve chosen the wisest thing go out and try to achieve it. Be it.
The children to whom we read simple stories may or may not show gratitude, but each boon we give strengthens the pillars of the world.
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
I am always talking about the human condition and about American society in particular: what it is like to be human, what makes us weep, what makes us fall and stumble and somehow rise and go on from darkness into darkness and that darkness carpeted.
And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.
Poetry gave me back my voice.
I’m a feminist. I’ve been a female for a long time now. It’d be stupid not to be on my own side.
If I wanted to write, I had to be willing to develop a kind of concentration found mostly in people awaiting execution. I had to learn technique and surrender my ignorance.