"What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one's glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. And yet, in our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins."

"I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life."

"He beat me when you not here, I say.Who do, she say, Albert?Mr ____, I say.I can't believe it, she say. She sit down on the bench next to me real hard, like she drop.What he beat you for? she ast.For being me and not you."

"Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me."

"I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it."

"Long as I can spell G-o-d I got somebody along."

"They be marching hand in hand, like going to war."

"One of the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement is that when you travel through the South today, you do not feel overwhelmed by a residue of grievance and hate."

"Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved."

"The crushed teapot in the rubbish of the bulldozed house will sing in your ears forever."

"Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it, also."

"We do it because we care. We care that Vincent Van Gogh mutilated his ear. We care that behind a pile of manure in the yard he destroyed his life. We care that Scott Joplin's music lives! We care because we know this: the life we save is our own."

"Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman's normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors."

"If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind."

"Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me."

"She got a long pointed nose and big fleshy mouth. Lips look like black plum. Eyes big, glossy. Feverish. And mean. Like, sick as she is, if a snake cross her path, she kill it."

"The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate."

"The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'"

"Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself."

"Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise."

"Time moves slowly, but passes quickly."

"It didn't take long to realize I didn't hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a woman or a bush it don't mean nothing if you don't ast why you here, period."

"Shug say, What, too shamefaced to put singing and dancing and fucking together? She laugh. That's the reason they call what us sing the devil's music. Devils love to fuck."

"Even as I hold you, I am letting you go."

"No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow."

"Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for."

"For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse."

"Why should the killers of the world be "the future" and not us?"

"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."

"I'm not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself - then they get to say 'See, you did it yourself.'"

"Dear Nettie, I don't write to God no more, I write to you."

"Creation is a sustained period of bliss, even though the subject can still be very sad. Because there's the triumph of coming through and understanding that you have, and that you did it the way only you could do it. You didn't do it the way somebody told you to do it."

"Women have to summon up courage to fulfill dormant dreams."