To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify.

Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?

To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires.

We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.

Maybe the purpose of being here, wherever we are, is to increase the durability and occasions of love among and between peoples.

Overall, white men run America. From nuclear armaments to the filth and jeopardy of New York City subways to the cruel mismanagement of health care, is there anything to boast about?

Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?

To tell the truth is to become beautiful.

If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable.

How do you say, 'Do things for me without me asking you to' since in saying that, you are asking them?

Who thinks to interview their own mother? As a self-fixated teen, I never imagined that she had an actual personal history. To my young eyes, she was Source of Cash Obsessed With De-Cluttering

The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good and thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burdens of the past.

The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.

I am an optimist because I don't see the point in being anything else.

I am an investigator by inclination. I feel a great thirst for knowledge.

It depends on what you mean by the word religion. Certainly I don't go to temples and pray to the gods or anything like that.

It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another-but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.

As I've gotten older and grown more independent, I think for myself, and that's how it should be.

Eyes open, then," I say, tapping the skin between my eyebrows. I don’t really need her eyes to be on mine, but I feel better when they are.