I’ve never thought of leaving the South, never.
Through my tears I found god in myself and I loved her fiercely.
I’m a firm believer that language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives and other people’s lives.
I write for young girls of color, for girls who don’t even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive. I can only change how they live, not how they think.
Where there is a woman there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits.
And this is for Colored girls who have considered suicide, but are moving to the ends of their own rainbows.
I am gonna write poems til i die and when i have gotten outta this body i am gonna hang round in the wind and knock over everybody who got their feet on the ground.
When I die, I will no be guilty of having left a generation of girls behind thinking that anyone can tend to their emotional health other than themselves.
Where there is a woman there is magic.
Creation is everything you do. Make something.
Being alive and being a woman is all I got, but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven’t conquered yet.
Our society allows people to be absolutely neurotic and totally out of touch with their feelings and everyone else’s feelings, and yet be very respectable.
I hit my head against the wall because I don’t want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don’t want to feel all these wretched things, but they’re in me already. If I don’t get rid of them, I’m not ever going to feel anything else.
Novels allow me to create a whole world.