“You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.”
“Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.”
“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.”
“There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people.”
“Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.”
“I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.”
“She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”
“I like marriage. The idea.”
“Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.”
“I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.”
“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”
“The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.”
“As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.”
“The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.”
“It's been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it's about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion.”
“Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.”
“I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.”