Because white men can’t police their imaginations, black men are dying.

I want to believe that in any relational moment a person understands that the other person in front of them is just another human being.

You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you.

The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.

Define loneliness? Yes. It's what we can't do for each other.

Poetry has no investment in anything besides openness. It's not arguing a point. It's creating an environment.

Sometimes the art pieces I gravitate toward speak to me in terms of narrative, at other times they speak to me in terms of mood.

The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much / to you.

If you admit to being racist, it says you acknowledge that you are being driven by projections and stereotypes that were formed in the creation of our country. Racism is deeply rooted in America.

Where is the safest place when that place / must be someplace other than in the body?

I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies.

Life’s good when it’s lived for oneself

But that’s what He does. Waits until the darkness seems too deep to be overcome, and then, here comes the light.

Magic doesn’t work when you’re sad.

Why is it so painful to watch a person sink? Because there is something unnatural in it, for nature demands personal progress, evolution, and every backward step means wasted energy.

[Donald] Trump has many and one of the most obvious is right here in Washington.

The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make.

God bless our good and gracious King, Whose promise none relies on; Who never said a foolish thing, Nor ever did a wise one.

If you are afraid of the sunlight, you ain't a good man!

To read quotations is to live in a planet with multiple suns!

Avoid taking a definite stand on great public issues either in the Senate or before the people. Bend your energies towards making friends of key men in all classes of voters.