we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry.

Remember you live in a community. You have a responsibility to be accountable to your family and your community as well as yourself.

Sometimes a breakdown can be the beginning of a kind of breakthrough, a way of living in advance through a trauma that prepares you for a future of radical transformation.

I am a woman with a foot in both worlds; and I refuse the split. I feel the necessity for dialogue. Sometimes I feel it urgently.

The nationalism I seek is one that decolonizes the brown and female body as it decolonizes the brown and female earth

But it is not really difference the oppressor fears so much as similarity.

The passage is through, not over, not by, not around but through.

Spirituality which inspires activism and, similarly, politics which move the spirit - which draw from the deep-seated place of our greatest longings for freedom - give meaning to our lives.

When you are not physically starving, you have the luxury to realize psychic and emotional starvation.

The revolution begins at home.

Oppression does not make for hearts as big as all outdoors. Oppression makes us big and small. Expressive and silenced. Deep and dead.

It isn't until you forgive what's in the past that you'll be able to receive the gift of the present

I tend to feel really protective of songs, and if they aren't sitting well in a record, I'll pull them tight to my chest until I feel it's a better time.

I was pretty tough and serious in my 20s.

I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.

Our devil has pale skin and blue eyes

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke

He who has no confidence utters falsehoods, and he who utters falsehoods has no confidence.

An appreciation for high fashion does not preclude possession of common sense.

Don’t question in the dark what God showed you in the light.

It's better to be hanged for loyalty than be rewarded for betrayal.