 And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read. |
| Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me. |
| There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation. |
| What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears. |
| I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. |
| The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account. |
| To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people. |
| Horses make a landscape look beautiful. |
| I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart. |
| In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful. |
| All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world. |
| People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools. |
| The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout. |
| It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's "mature" critics often are. |
| Is solace anywhere more comforting than that in the arms of a sister. |
| People tend to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but actually only some people progress. The rest of the people don't. |
| Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence. |
| Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself. |
| The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn't want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass. |
| Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it. |
