Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My heart is not peripheral to me.
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
I am working never to be late again.
We are the ones we've been waiting for.
To tell the truth is to become beautiful.
To believe is to become what you believe.
We survive our love because we go on loving.
I am the history of the rejection of who I am
To begin is no more agony than opening your hand.
CORE was committed to nonviolence, but I was not.
I am a stranger, learning to love the strangers around me
As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words.
Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
I believe that love is the single, true prosperity of any moment.
It means to educate myself incessantly about the world around me.
What tyranny could exceed a tyranny that dictates to the human heart?
If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable.
Revolution always unfolds inside an atmosphere of rising expectations.
Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires.
My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.
As I am a poet I express what I believe, and I fight against whatever I oppose, in poetry.
I think I have come to a place where I'm able to feel more comfortable about being honest.
A democratic state is not proven by the welfare of the strong but by the welfare of the weak.
But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.
Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.
Like running trying to live a good life has to hurt a little bit, or we're not running hard enough, not really trying.
Maybe the purpose of being here, wherever we are, is to increase the durability and occasions of love among and between peoples.
That a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.
Sometimes we become so sophisticated we have to read the New York Times in order to figure out whether it's a hot or a rainy day.
To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.
There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.
The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet
The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think
The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet.
The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.
Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?
Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine.
The neglected legacy of the Sixties is just this: unabashed moral certitude, and the purity -- the incredibly outgoing energy -- of righteous rage.
As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language.
To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify.
The purpose of polite behavior is never virtuous. Deceit, surrender, and concealment these are not virtues. The goal of the mannerly is comfort, per se.
We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.
The thing about genius is it will never yield to circumstances. Genius regards what's given as the beginning of its need to find or devise something else.
In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.
Let me just say, at once: I am not now nor have I ever been a white man. And, leaving aside the joys of unearned privilege, this leaves me feeling pretty good.
Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?
If we even tolerate any oppression of gay and lesbian Americans, if we join those who would intrude upon the choices of our hearts, then who among us shall be free?
I do believe that the analogy for bisexuality is a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multiracial world view. Bisexuality follows from such a perspective and leads to it, as well.
Americans have begun to understand that trouble does not start somewhere on the other side of town. It seems to originate inside the absolute middle of the homemade cherry pie.
Overall, white men run America. From nuclear armaments to the filth and jeopardy of New York City subways to the cruel mismanagement of health care, is there anything to boast about?