"Oppression is as American as apple pie."

"I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge."

"I can't really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too?"

"Revolution is not a one time event."

"I am deliberate and afraid of nothing."

"For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices."

"The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors' tactics, the oppressors' relationships."

"As a Black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage, there was usually some part of me guaranteed to offend everybody's comfortable prejudices of who I should be."

"While we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness the weight of that silence will choke us."

"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."

"There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt."

"Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that is is the task of women of Color to educated white women - in the face of tremendous resistance - as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought."

"We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not."

"If you come as softlyAs wind within the treesYou may hear what I hearSee what sorrow sees.If you come as lightlyAs threading dewI will take you gladlyNor ask more of you.You may sit beside meSilent as a breathOnly those who stay deadShall remember death.And if you come I will be silentNor speak harsh words to you.I will not ask you why, now.Or how, or what you do.We shall sit here, softlyBeneath two different yearsAnd the rich earth between usShall drink our tears."

"It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences."

"Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist."

"If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core -- the fountain -- of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. (From "Poetry is Not a Luxury")"

"We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired."

"The angers between women will not kill us if we can articulate them with precision, if we listen to the content of what is said with at least as much intensity as we defend ourselves agains the manner of saying. When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar. I have tried to learn my anger's usefulness to me, as well as its limitations."

"It's a struggle but that's why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again."

"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."

"The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot."

"Part of the lesbian consciousness is an absolute recognition of the erotic within our lives and, taking that a step further, dealing with the erotic not only in sexual terms."

"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."

"Love is a word, another kind of open.As the diamond comesinto a knot of flameI am Blackbecause I come from the earth's insidetake my word for jewelin the open light."

"When there is no connection at all between people, then anger is a way of bringing them closer together, of making contact. But when there is a great deal of connectedness that is problematic or threatening or unacknowledged, then anger is a way of keeping people separate, of putting distance between us."

"Hatred is a death wish for the hated not a life wish for anything else."

"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."

"There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives."

"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

"No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman."

"We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way."

"Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people."

"A choice of pains. That's what living was all about."

"I became more courageous by doing the very things I needed to be courageous for-first a little and badly. Then bit by bit more and better. Being avidly-sometimes annoy-ingly-curious and persistent about discovering how others were doing what I wanted to do."

"And when we speak we are afraidour words will not be heardnor welcomedbut when we are silentwe are still afraidSo it is better to speakrememberingwe were never meant to survive."

"Laten we op zoek gaan naar 'vreugde' in plaats van naar eerlijk voedsel en schone lucht en een gezondere toekomst op een bewoonbare planeet! Alsof geluk volstaat om ons te beschermen tegen de gevolgen van winst-waanzin."

"The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives."

"Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now."

"Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future."

"Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless."

"Art is not living. It is the use of living."

"There are lesbians, God knows... if you came up through lesbian circles in the forties and fifties in New York... who were not feminist and would not call themselves feminists."

"I seek no favor untouched by blood."

"Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge."

"Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity."

"Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly "inferior" capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear."

"I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self."

"My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences."

"Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me-so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins."