Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.
Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.
Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.
Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.
Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.
All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.
She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.
Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.
When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.