Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
Sometimes the names were humiliating, deliberately so. Somebody would pick out your flaw. If you were little, they would call you Shorty. And if you were angry, they would call you the Devil.
Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.
If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.
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.
Misery don’t call ahead. That’s why you have to stay awake – otherwise it just walks on in your door.
Love is never any better than the lover.
It was a fine cry – loud and long – but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.
Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
When I’m not creating or focusing on something I can imagine or invent, I think I go back over my life – I don’t recommend this by the way – and you pick up, oh, what’d you do that for? Why didn’t you understand this?
She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
Racism will disappear when it’s no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it’ll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.
At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.
As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.
There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.
Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.
A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves – a special kind of double.
Passion is never enough; neither is skill.