Poet

Saya suka melihat seorang gadis muda keluar dan merebut dunia dengan kerah. Hidup itu menyebalkan. Anda harus keluar dan menendang pantat.

It's so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I've never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.

I have great respect for the past. If you don't know where you've come from, you don't know where you're going. I have respect for the past, but I'm a person of the moment. I'm here, and I do my best to be completely centered at the place I'm at, then I go forward to the next place.

I wasn't a pretty girl. I was six feet tall at 15, you know.

I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money.' Yes, I think everybody should be paid handsomely; I insist on it, and I pay people who work for me, or with me, handsomely.

Anda mungkin menemukan banyak kekalahan tetapi Anda tidak harus dikalahkan.

For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God's creation.

I am never proud to participate in violence, yet I know that each of us must care enough for ourselves that we can be ready and able to come to our own defense when and wherever needed.

Cinta tidak mengenal hambatan. Cinta melewati rintangan, melompati pagar hambatan, dan menembus tembok untuk sampai ke tempat tujuan yang penuh harapan.

Fighting for one's freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

Most people don't grow up. It's too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That's the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don't grow up.

My mom was a terrible parent of young children. And thank God - I thank God every time I think of it - I was sent to my paternal grandmother. Ah, but my mother was a great parent of a young adult.

A black person grows up in this country - and in many places - knowing that racism will be as familiar as salt to the tongue. Also, it can be as dangerous as too much salt. I think that you must struggle for betterment for yourself and for everyone.

We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.

I was a dancer for many years. I was a premier dancer with 'Porgy and Bess,' the opera. And I taught dance some, in different places.

Elimination of illiteracy is as serious an issue to our history as the abolition of slavery.

Life loves the liver of it.

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.

I've still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, 'You know, that's the truth. I wasn't there, and I wasn't a six-foot black girl, but that's the truth.'