 Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests. |
| Your silence will not protect you. |
| We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other. |
| When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture. |
| I would like to do another piece of fiction dealing with a number of issues: Lesbian parenting, the 1960's, and interracial relationships in the Lesbian and Gay community. |
| The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference. |
| When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid. |
| I can't really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too? |
| I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell. |
| In discussions around the hiring and firing of Black faculty at universities, the charge is frequently heard that Black women are more easily hired than are Black men. |
| Art is not living. It is the use of living. |
| Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before. |
| There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt. |
| It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences. |
| In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction. |
| The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower. |
| You know how fighting fish do it? They blow bubbles and in each one of those bubbles is an egg and they float the egg up to the surface. They keep this whole heavy nest of eggs floating, and they're constantly repairing it. It's as if they live in both elements. |
| But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women. |
| There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else. |
| Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now. |
