Racism is so extreme and so pervasive in our American society that no black individual lives in an atmosphere of freedom.
When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.
Friends and good manners will carry you where money won't go.
A writer needs certain conditions in which to work and create art. She needs a piece of time; a peace of mind; a quiet place; and a private life.
You is born lucky, and it’s better to be born lucky than born rich, cause if you is lucky you can git rich, but if you is born rich and you ain’t lucky you is liables to lose all you got.
The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.
Only ways you can keep folks hating is to keep them apart and separated from each other.
The Word of fire burns today On the lips of our prophets in an evil age.
I want my careless song to strike no minor key; no fiend to stand between my body’s Southern song – the fusion of the South, my body’s song and me.
White folks needs what black folks got just as much as black folks needs what white folks got, and we’s all got to stay here mongst each other and git along, that’s what.
Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth.
Love stretches your heart and makes you big inside.
My grandmothers are full of memories, smelling of soap and onions and wet clay, with veins rolling roughly over quick hands, they have many clean words to say, my grandmothers were strong.
Now when you hates you shrinks up inside and gets littler and you squeezes your heart tight and you stays so mad with peoples you feels sick all the time like you needs the doctor.
I have always secretly felt that what mankind should be in an ideal sense is that mixture of people and races. I really believe in it. I don’t think there is anything sacred in the integrity of race, white or black.
She had to find a way to lift them together. The only thing she had was a moan. And she moaned. That moan would become a Spiritual; that Spiritual would become Jazz; which would become Blues then Rhythm and Blues then Rap. That moan would define not only a people but the nation to which they were sailing. That moan would make those people decide that they should, that they could, live.
When we think of Space, when we begin to understand the Martian, we know we must send a black woman on that ship. She is the one who will weather the journey; she will find a song. When she arrives on Mars she will be the one who will greet the life form.