Seeing their children touched and seared and wounded by race prejudice is one of the heaviest crosses which colored women have to bear.

And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go, struggling and striving, and hoping that the buds and blossoms of our desires will burst into glorious fruition ere long.

While most girls run away from home to marry, I ran away to teach.

Stop using the word 'Negro.' The word is a misnomer from every point of view. It does not represent a country or anything else ... I am an African-American.

It is only through the home that a people can become really good and truly great.

As a colored woman I might enter Washington any night, stranger in a strange land, and walk miles without finding a place to lay my head

To the lack of incentive to effort, which is the awful shadow under which we live, may be traced the wreck and ruin of scores of colored youth.

Lifting as they climb onward and upward they go struggling and striving and hoping that the buds and blossoms of their desires may burst into glorious fruition ere long.

To the lack of incentive to effort which is the awful shadow under which we live may be traced the wreck and ruin of scores of colored youth.

Don't confuse activity with action.

I'm not good with bullies and zealots.

Oh, 1994, April 27. There won't be a day like that ever again. I mean, the sky was blue, with a blueness that had never been there before.

Every time we tell anybody to cheer up, things might be worse, we run away for fear we might be asked to specify how.

Torture fails to make us safe, but it certainly makes us less free.

Food is "everyday"-it has to be, or we would not survive for long. But food is never just something to eat. It is something to find or hunt or cultivate first of all.

If God to you is where science has yet to tread, then God is an ever-receding pocket.

How do I keep fit? I lay down a lot.

There are a lot of different sides to me. I don't know if I'm always peaches-and-cream.

What madness is this, inviting sable Death by warfare? It always hovers close and comes unforeseen on silent steps.