Survival is an art. It requires the dulling of the mind and the senses, and a delicate attunement to waiting, without insisting on precision about just what it is you are waiting for.
I’d discovered you never know yourself until you’re tested and that you don’t even know you’re being tested until afterwards, and that in fact there isn’t anyone giving the test except yourself.
The very notion of superiority of one kind over another will have to disappear, although differences among kind will remain.
There is no power greater than the power of passive dependency.
Losing the future is the best thing that ever happened to me.
For many people, morality means a set of rules governing the disposition on one’s genital organs; or a set of injunctions against lying, stealing, or killing except when such acts are sanctioned by church or state.
Men’s need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it.
In a great gasp, puts her head in her hands again and cries as if her throat were a cave, as if the howling winds came from her belly, she cries like a storm that will never end.
It’s strange how men feel they have the right to criticize a woman’s appearance to her face.
Desire consumes you, it takes you over. You forget yourself completely. All you can think about is the other, the one you desire, your self is just a fire.
Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can’t even think straight.
When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That’s progress?
It isn’t success after all, is it, if it isn’t an expression of your deepest energies?
Oh, God, why don’t I remember that a little chaos is good for the soul?
Men seem unable to feel equal to women: they must be superior or they are inferior.
Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you’re trying to escape?
Anyone determined to find another person or group inferior can always find whole lists of grounds that demonstrate inferiority because we are all inferior to the ideals of humanness we have erected.
And there are so much easier ways to destroy a woman. You don’t have to rape her or kill her; you don’t even have to beat her. You can just marry her. You don’t even have to do that. You can just let her work in your office for thirty-five dollars a week.
All men are rapists, and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, their codes.
She was dizzy with her own feelings, her own voice. She was flying around on a carnival machine that would not stop, she could not make it stop and she screamed and screamed.
In Harlem the government pushes heroin to keep the blacks down and doctors by the thousands give barbiturates and tranquilizers to all the housewives: keep the natives quiet. when the drugs don’t work anymore, they put the blacks in jail and us in here. Don’t make noise. I read a poem once, it had a line, something like ‘You keep stiller when every time you move something jangles’.