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I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same time, there's a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they're not the same, ever again.

My mother had bought a sewing machine for me. When I went away to college, she gave me a sewing machine, a typewriter and a suitcase, and my mother made $17 a week working as a maid 12 hours a day, and she did that for me.

I think the War on Terror is really absurd, especially coming from a country that is founded on terrorism.

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman's normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's 'mature' critics often are.

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.

Puisi adalah sumber kehidupan pemberontakan, revolusi, dan peningkatan kesadaran.

My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.

I believe you mother everybody, not in a cloying, hovering way, but taking care of what is around you.

Karunia paling berarti yang dihadiahkan Tuhan dalam hidup ini sesungguhnya bukanlah berupa barang, tapi kesempatan.

'Terima kasih' adalah doa terbaik yang bisa dikatakan oleh siapapun. Saya mengatakan itu banyak. Terima kasih atas ucapan terima kasih, kerendahan hati, pengertian yang ekstrem.

Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

Kita harus belajar menerima bahwa perubahan adalah satu-satunya hal yang selalu terjadi, dan belajar untuk berjalan dengannya dan menikmatinya.

Jangan menunggu orang lain berbahagia untuk Anda. Kebahagiaan apa pun yang Anda dapatkan harus Anda buat sendiri.

I'm very disappointed in Obama. I was very much in support of him in the beginning, but I cannot support war. I cannot support droning. I cannot support capitulating to the banks.

I love us so incredibly, insanely deeply; it's almost unbearable to see what we do to ourselves.

It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put - without delay, and with tenderness - back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice and respect because the injustice and disrespect have been so severe. But I believe we are right to try.

At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.

I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn't in her.